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FeedOct 3, 201212:07 PMBlaska's Bring It!
with David Blaska
Obama-Speak for Socialism
The failures of the current president and his congressional allies are so incontestable that they retaliate by demonizing those who have succeeded. Their failures are due not as much to executive ineptitude as to their very creed.
The Obama regime has added nearly $6 trillion to a public debt that has eclipsed the $16 trillion mark for the first time in history. That’s more government debt per person than Portugal, Italy, Spain, or Greece.
After a post-Great Depression record 44 months of 8% unemployment or worse, 23 million Americans are out of work, have stopped looking for work, or are underemployed. The progressives’ excuse: The stimulus wasn’t big enough.
Certainly, Barack Obama is the most leftist president since LBJ, who waged two wars and lost both: one in southeast Asia, the other – the War on Poverty – at home.
The “Great Society” created, in the words of the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel, “an ugly dystopian reality in the cities [and] a violent, nihilistic radicalism on campus” that survives to this day. Those campus radicals achieved tenure and wrote politically correct speech codes. Entire city blocks are gutted by dependents of the welfare state – multi-generational, angry, and often, drug-addled.
It is no coincidence that Obama’s chosen profession, community organizer, is a creation of the so-called Great Society. Or that Occupy Wall Street, the Left’s blame-the-rich answer to the taxpaying and law-abiding Tea Party movement, degenerated into decadence, defecation, disease, and property destruction.
Progressivism, the credo that gave us eugenics and Prohibition and tried to disarm law-abiding citizens of the ability to defend themselves, must be exposed for what it is: a false front for the coercive enterprise called socialism.
Teachers unions, the shock troops of the party of progressivism, embody the horrors of collectivization. Their intransigent hold on the K-12 public school monopoly has helped churn out legions of functionally illiterate, virtually unemployable wards of the state.
Progressivism’s failures are the inevitable wages of its:
• devotion to top-down, central planning,
• perception of people as victims rather than causative agents, and
• hostility to individual choice, the competition of the marketplace, and the creative forces thereby unleashed. (See: charter schools.)
Progressives are self-proclaimed experts who know how much soda pop should be dispensed to a populace and how much free speech to curtail at election time.
With the economy flat-lining, the ruling Democrat(ic) party gave Sandra Fluke its convention podium to demand, as a proper victim, that a private Catholic university pay for her birth control bill. So that this may be given, something must be taken – in this case, freedom of religious practice.
Government as national wet nurse requires huge, honking programs too big to get out of their own way, resulting in “a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us,” warns our next vice president, Paul Ryan.
Washington has taken over health care, one-sixth of the national economy. Obamacare will be dictated by an unelected, 17-member politburo that will replace individual choice. It is no happenstance that its enabling legislation runs to 2,471 pages. We’re still finding out what’s in the bill.
This predilection for a directed economy is rooted in the 1930s, whether FDR’s New Deal, Stalin’s five-year plans on behalf of “the masses,” or Mussolini’s dirigisme. Fascism and socialism, as F.A. Hayek observed, are two sides of the same coin.
The British historian Paul Johnson noted, “The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands, too.” That’s why America’s founders took great pains to limit government in favor of individual freedom.
The Siege of the Wisconsin Capitol in early 2011 may have been progressivism’s noisy wake. That big, fat government-employee temper tantrum unleashed sporadic vandalism, profanity, and death threats. Unionized teachers illegally walked out of their classrooms and faked doctor’s excuses. Businesses were threatened with boycotts. Democratically elected officials were hectored and harassed. Bullhorns, chants, drum circles, and MSNBC’s Mr. Ed shouted down civil discourse.
When the public sector unions and their allies, including the International Socialist Workers party, failed to overturn the elected government, The Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild called on his cadres “to make Wisconsin ungovernable.”
Instead, Wisconsin voters showed what democracy really looks like by giving Gov. Walker an even larger mandate in the June recall election. They will choose freedom again on Nov. 6.
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Raised on a farm near Sun Prairie, David Blaska is a recovering liberal who spent 18 years in daily newspapers, including 12 at The Capital Times in Madison as a reporter and editor. He served Gov. Tommy Thompson as acting press secretary in 1998 and is a veteran and survivor of 19 years in state government. He served 12 years on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. From December 2007 to November 2011 he wrote the consistently popular "
David: There is a lot that is objectionable to your argument. The economy today is far more de-regulated than it was 20 to 40 years ago. Think communications, finance, transportation, education, etc. But that's a conversation for another day. My point here is that blaming Prohibition on Progressives is historically inaccurate. Read Daniel Okrent's entertaining and informative: "Last Call: The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition." Prohibition was the first modern single-issue movement to sweep to power. The Anti-Saloon League, led by an extraordinarily astute Karl Rove-like figure named Wayne Wheeler, voted en massed for anti-booze candidates whether they were Democrat, Republican or Progressive. It was Wheeler who made the endorsement, and he usually could swing at least 10% of the electorate. Progressive leaders may have sometimes supported the movement, but it's core was in America's small-towns, in Protestant clergy (like Billy Sunday), in plutocrats (and teetotalers) like John D. Rockefeller, who felt drink was corrupting the workforce. (He was a big funder of the Anti-Saloon League.) Much of their ire was aimed at the immigrant "others" flooding the shores--the Irish, the Catholics of all sorts, the Jews, and the southern European garlic-eaters. In the south, there was a distinctly racist twist to the Prohibition movement, aimed at controlling black people. To confuse Progressivism with this backlash against demographic change is a mistake. If anything, the Prohibition movement has more in common with the rightwing populism of today. Marc
The Prohibition movement has more in common with today's rightwing populism? How so? Soda pop bans? Chicken restaurant bans? Those are not bans by Republican mayors, but Democrat.
Unease with immigrants.
Unease with "obese" people who also do not share their statist values.
Marc, I AM reading Daniel Okrent's book. Pages 46-51: "At first glance, a form of race hatred (against the Irish) could have been seen as the motivation of the second component of the dry coalition, the bien-pensant northeasterers who would come to be known as progressives."... At the same time, many progressives who despise the immigrants way of life sought to improve it ... 'the polyglot class' could be lifted up from his 'dirt and beer.'" ... Other prominent figures of the progressive movement, such as the settlement house pioneers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, supported Prohibition ..."
"The progressives also exalted the methodology of science, under the meticulous supervision of a self-selected elite. ... Progressive support for Prohibition was further emented by prohibitionist support for the progressives' favorite causes."
You are correct that Wayne Wheeler boasted that Prohibition is "this one thing we do."
"But," Okrent writes, "if the 'one thing' -- Prohibition -- could be achieved by making common cause with other groups whose goals could be made to line up with its own, the (Wheeler group) could be very accommodating.
Also, Marc, Madison's own Wild Bill Evjue, who founded The Capital Times as the progressive organ for Fighting Bob La Follette, was a dry, as Mike Miller wrote in 2009. Old Bob, representing Wisconsin, kept his powder dry.
[ http://host.madison.com/about/cap-times-history-fighting-the-klan-growing-stronger/article_0323609e-b91e-5a73-89c7-467d4f608fb9.html ]
Not Bill Evjue!!! Didn't Cedric Parker and most of the Cap Times staffers keep bottles of booze in their desks? Heck, even when I worked there in the '80s, those long Friday night shifts were sometimes enlivened by a nip.
I agree that some Progressives supported Prohibition out of their reformist beliefs. But the Okrent book doesn't make the case that Progressivism powered the movement through the decades.
Enjoy the book. I love the part about "wet drys," "dry drys," "dry wets," and "wet wets"--"wet drys" were pols who drank with relish in private, but publicly for political reason supported Prohibition.
Where would society be without a measure of hypocrisy?
Early on in my tenure there, one of the sports writers hired during the 1940s would open the bottom drawer of his desk, upon filing his story, and take a swig. And the sports guys deadline was early in the a.m.!
I myself would polish off 5 cans of a six-pack of PBR writing a nighttime story. You are correct to say that the antecedents of Prohibition were many and varied, including Bible-thumping fundamentalism, the Women's Movement (I don't mean to deprecate here: chronic drunks were wife beaters), and nativism. Prohibition did result in a compromise: booze, but regulated. And taxed!
But Progressivism, the philosophy, did play a major role. In addition to those mentioned above, consider such Prog stalwarts as California's Hiram Johnson, Nebraska's George Norris, and PA's Gifford Pinchot. (Page 142) "Pinchot, a member of Theodore Roosevelt's inner circle ... was a progressive who believed government was an implement designed to improve the lot of the people, whether or not they wanted their lot improved. ... elected (governor), he pledged to bar liquor ..."
But, yes, to the hypocrisy, which often attends moralist attempts to "improve the lot of the people."
"Prohibition is better than no liquor at all."