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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| America needs to study the enemy within |
| 2015-01-01 |
| A leftist professor bemoans "political gridlock" As to the headline: any time a leftist says (insert noun here) needs (something favorable to the left) it usually means (something favorable to the left) is the last thing (insert noun here) needs. When I was living in Chile in 1968, my Chilean friends often explained to me proudly that their country was different from other Latin American countries. Chile had a long democratic tradition. Its armed forces had rarely and only briefly meddled in the government, and not at all since 1932. Chile was blessed by a strong cultural identity and a big middle class. It had a diversified economy that combined the world's largest copper mines with manufacturing and agriculture. Chileans were better educated than other Latin Americans, and they based their universities and agriculture on European models. Most of all, they explained, Chileans knew how to govern themselves, as summarized in the saying "We Chileans will never be extremists." My friends then didn't foresee what would happen five years later. In 1973, after decades of democratic elections, Chile's armed forces overthrew then-President Salvador Allende. The resulting Chilean military government, under General Augusto Pinochet, set modern world records for inventing sadistic sexual tortures too revolting to describe in print. It aimed to exterminate its opponents, "disappearing" and killing thousands of Chileans and driving a hundred thousand more into exile. Pinochet held on to power for 17 years. They were bastards and they were our bastards, for sure. In retrospect, there had been abundant signs of trouble brewing in Chile for years before the coup. The country's left, right and center political parties, which drew roughly equal numbers of votes, couldn't agree on how to address Chile's chronic economic and social problems, which kept the Congress in a state of gridlock. Allende had been elected by a narrow 36% plurality of voters, and his party coalition controlled neither house of Congress, yet he nevertheless tried to introduce radical political and economic changes. Just like Barky, 'cept Barky had two solid years of control of the government, and still couldn't get anything done other than the Frankenstein monster colloquially known as Obamacare was created, without a single republican vote of approval. When the armed forces finally launched their coup and imposed a right-wing dictatorship, it initially received broad support from centrist Chileans, frustrated by years of government gridlock and the declining Chilean economy. Moderate Chileans reasoned that the military dictatorship would be just a brief transitional stage necessary to restore functional democracy to Chile. Iffin our military does that they'd best have a damn good reason for doing it. Chile is by no means the only place where government gridlock and breakdown of political compromise led ultimately to military dictatorship, the end of democracy and (in some cases) civil war. Examples include Egypt today, Indonesia in 1957, Spain in the late 1930s and Austria just before the Nazi era. All sh*tholes I wouldn't go to unless I was well paid to be there. So, should we worry about possible parallels between Chile in 1968 and the U.S. today? On the one hand, it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship. Like my Chilean friends then, we Americans are proud of our long democratic tradition and our political stability. We are blessed by a strong national identity and a large middle class. Our highly diversified economy, the biggest in the world, includes resource extraction (especially of oil), manufacturing, agriculture, and technological innovation. Our citizens are highly educated, and we can boast of the world's best universities. Ever since our nation's independence in 1783, we have known how to govern ourselves. But, on the other hand, like Chileans before and under Allende, we have become stuck in political gridlock. Our citizens are split by deep disagreements about basic economic, social and political issues, including government interventions, immigration, investment in education and infrastructure, and inequality of income and opportunity. Our economy is decidedly sluggish. One of the things I learned while getting my degree was that a theory, just a theory at the time, but now, not quite provable, that if the government does enough borrowing it could have a "crowding out" effect on economic growth, since the government would "crowd out" corporations for a slice of available currency. But that is not how currency and our banking system works. You can create money, really, by one of two ways 1) Making a profit, or 2) Borrowing. If the government borrows so much it crowds out business it would have far more to do with other factors than just the massive amount of money going into government coffers, The excessive regulation, along with still high taxation gives businesses large and small the notion that their activity is less important than the government rocketing into massive deficits year after year. That is what kills economic growth. That and we ain't making enough babies. Meanwhile, our politicians have been increasingly unwilling or unable to craft compromises. The most recent Congress passed fewer laws than any Congress in decades. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill couldn't agree even on matters that should have been noncontroversial, such as funding the Federal Aviation Administration and confirming the nominations of judges and second-level government officers. And American democracy is being eroded by partisan measures aimed at preventing registration or voting by citizens likely to prefer the other party, and by massive distortion of elections by big money. Obama and his supporters think that their ideas are so good no one decent could possibly be justified in opposing them. That is at the heart of this moke's contentions about who their enemy is. You may object that the American armed forces, unlike those in Chile or Indonesia or Spain, have no precedent at all for interfering in American politics. That's true. But consider what happened in 1933 in Austria, where private citizens had increasingly been arming themselves and forming private militias. When Austria's Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss abolished the country's legislature and established an authoritarian right-wing government, he didn't use an Austrian army to crush his left-wing political opponents. He did it with a militia of his own armed supporters. Our left made a strategic decision sometime in the late 1980s that their "militia" would comprise mainly the police, and then they set about making laws, adopting standards, expanding the number of police and then going after citizens using those forces. So the next time you hear a leftist lamenting armed militias of private citizens, it would be useful to remind them that their security forces, very much in the thrall of the left, has been causing much more havoc than any militia ever has. Could that be possible here? Already, plenty of Americans are asserting the right to carry guns in previously unlikely places (such as in schools and government offices). Already, they are forming private militias for purposes such as patrolling the Mexican border and protecting a claimed right to graze cattle on federal lands. Again, when private citizen militias already carry guns for those purposes, it's "just" a matter of expanding the scope of an established principle to use guns for other purposes. The "scope" was expanded almost 300 years ago. Americans have the unfettered duty, in the face of tyranny, to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of their enemies. We Americans today are focused on the wrong threats to American democracy. We are obsessed with threats from overseas: from terrorists and Islamist extremists, and from other countries. But realistically, while terrorists and Islamists and other countries will continue to cause trouble for us, the chance of their ending American democracy is nil. The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves. If our politicians continue to yield to pressure from extremists not to compromise and remain mired in gridlock, the majority of decent Americans may in frustration come to view an authoritarian government as the only solution to political gridlock — as a lesser evil that has to be tolerated. The domestic threat? That's us. That said, I'm not claiming that all political differences can be resolved by compromise, especially when one side or another believes it can prevail without concessions. In Chile in 1973, the armed forces calculated, correctly, that they would quickly win an armed conflict. But Allende and his supporters also believed, incorrectly, that they could prevail, and so saw no need to compromise. Unsurprisingly like our left since Carter. Compromise is also unlikely when the opposing parties consider their ideals nonnegotiable, and worth dying for. In 1940, after Hitler's defeat of France placed Britain at great military disadvantage in the face of an expected German invasion, the British Cabinet debated whether to attempt a compromise with Hitler by giving up Malta and Gibraltar in exchange for a peace agreement. Winston Churchill eventually convinced his Cabinet not to compromise. In retrospect, we consider that Churchill was correct in that refusal to compromise. But neither of those impediments to compromise applies to the U.S. today. Americans are divided almost equally between liberals and conservatives; neither side has any reasonable hope of a quick victory if events turn violent. None of the issues about which Americans are now divided seems to me to approach in importance the survival of American democracy. Our issues aren't worth dying for, whereas, to the British of 1940, the consequences of a Nazi takeover were indeed worth dying for. He means worth killing for, stupid bastard. Decent Americans should learn from recent history. Compromising cherished political beliefs will be painful, for both Republicans and Democrats. But the alternative, as Chileans and Spaniards can attest, might be something far more painful than compromise. I won't compromise personal beliefs with the left, because the left has no decency and has no beliefs to compromise.Right now, it's just going the way of civil war, the direction the left has been spoiling for, for a long, long time. I guess I could help stop it by compromising on the 2nd Amendment, but then, those are my beliefs and are not available for compromise. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #6 it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship. JQC, you don't seem to get the problem here. For people of this ilk there's nothing wrong with dictatorship BY THE RIGHT PEOPLE! Call it "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "technocracy" or "aristocracy" (with self defined aristocrats) they are perfectly happy with a dictatorship by themselves. They only complain about a dictatorship when it is by folks they don't agree with or groups to which they do not belong. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2015-01-01 17:41 |
| #5 Another liberal seeing the world thru liberal eyes. He never does identify the nation's enemies but you get this feeling that implicit in the article and unstated is that the conservatives are the enemy. As an example, he mentions that citizens are arming themselves. He never mentions that it is a reaction to violent crime. it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship. Why? We have been heading in that direction as rapidly as Obama can make it happen. He has tried to circumvent both the Constitution and Congress in every way he can. The writer doesn't seem to understand "cause and effect." This author never quite seems to get the fact that in 2010 and again in 2014, the people have moved to protect themselves from Obama and the radical left. He just doesn't seem to like the direction of the country in response to Obama. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-01-01 15:21 |
| #4 2 more years of Bambi could do US in, Clem. :-( |
| Posted by: Barbara 2015-01-01 15:16 |
| #3 The left is discrediting itself. Two more years of the bamer should do it. |
| Posted by: Clem B. Hayes4986 2015-01-01 12:55 |
| #2 You know you have an ancient axe-grinding leftist when they mention Pinochet. Still mad, bro? |
| Posted by: Raj 2015-01-01 12:51 |
| #1 "compromise" means giving them 80% of what they want til you have to compromise away the other 20%. "see how reasonable we are?" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2015-01-01 12:47 |