Great Vocal Majority Podcast Volume 46: Evolution of American Counter-revolution Pt. 3

Great Vocal Majority Podcast

THE "BATTLE OF IDEAS": FROM FDR TO LBJ TO REAGAN

The debate between the left and the right has often been called, "The Battle of Ideas." For Progressives, the pinnacle of their power was reached when President Lyndon Johnson enacted the Great Society and War on Poverty programs of the early 1960s. Johnson saw himself as a Progressive in the mold of FDR, who guided the United States through the deprivations of the Great Depression through a series of interventionist policies, most of which proved to be largely ineffective, but were great public relations for activist and interventionist government. It gave the public the impression that their elected leaders were making every effort to alleviate their suffering. How well the programs were working was almost besides the point and without having a better idea, the Republicans were seen as anachronistic, almost brutish.

The Left rejoiced when Johnson declared War on Poverty. Their ideas would finally be put to the test and all the world would be able to witness the results. This form of activism had many political advantages, not the least of which was one the Founders warned as a signal of the end of the Republic itself. Benjamin Franklin is thought to have said, "When the people find they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." The political advantage to this is that it allows politicians to demonize anyone opposing these policies.

During the intervening half century, politicians did just that. Faced with program cost overruns, corruption and abuses of all kinds, the Progressives defended against any attempt at reform and improvement of these programs. Nevertheless, the programs were failing to achieve the desired results. Even the dire predictions of the inevitable moral hazards posed by these programs from Progressives were shouted down.

Perhaps the most famous of these were the warnings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who saw liberalization of welfare assistance as deleterious to the health of the nuclear family. Moynihan reasoned that if welfare allowances were increased with the number of children in a home without a male, father figure or breadwinner, then the family unit would be destabilized. Financial benefits would be greater to a home without a father present and fathers would be driven out of the home in order to gain a greater benefit. This is what is meant by a moral hazard.

A moral hazard is when a law creates a perverse incentive. Obviously, creating financial incentives which unintentionally drive fathers out of the home is not what the creators of these welfare programs wanted, but that is what they got. Moynihan was ridiculed for predicting this result, which he believed would affect the black family to a much greater degree simply because blacks were disproportionately poorer than whites and therefore more likely to be eligible for the program benefits.

The last half century of experience has proven Moynihan correct. Certainly there are many factors affecting fatherlessness, but the impact of perverse incentives on low income and poor black families cannot be overstated.

This is just one example, but there are many others which reflect how the ideas of the Left have failed with disastrous consequences for the country. By the end of the 1970s, America was ready for a change and they got it with the election of Ronald Reagan.

President Reagan was the most conservative President since Calvin Coolidge. He entered office after a period marked by generations of Progressive Presidents. Hoover, FDR, 1Truman, JFK, LBJ and Nixon would all identify as either left or right Progressives. Harding, Coolidge and Eisenhower were not Progressives. Reagan entered office standing against decades of Progressive history, with the task of undoing its damage. Considering the daunting task it was, Reagan put a significant dent into the Progressives momentum. The fantastic success of his economic policies was astonishing. Though today's Progressives do level criticism at Reagan's economic performance, it's hard to argue with the results: almost 25 years of uninterrupted economic growth and near full employment.

The success of the Reagan Presidency marked the first time Progressive policies suffered a major repudiation through the successful implementation of conservative public policy. At its core, Reagan's economic policy employed so called "supply side economic theory." At the risk of oversimplification, the theory treated the macroeconomic inputs of labor and capital as responsive to the change in their prices. Therefore, as the theory goes, if policy could lower the price of both labor and capital, we should witness greater demand for both. Through lowering marginal tax rates on labor and capital, coupled with regulatory reform, the cost of both could be reduced. Increased demand for labor means jobs. Increased demand for capital means investment. The two combined together equals growth. Supply side economics worked.

Progressives have been touting the Keynsian model for economic growth since the Great Depression. The efficacy of the Keynsian model was doubted even by FDR's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morganthau. The Keynsian model targets demand for goods and services in the aggregate. It relies on government spending in deficit. Essentially, the theory states that a dollar spent by the government trickles its way down through the economy in such a manner that it generates more than a dollar of economic activity. The difference over the amount originally spent by the government is called, "the multiplier effect." The only trouble is, Keynsianism does not appear to work, or at best is of very limited utility.

In 1939, the aforementioned Henry Morganthau, in the company of Democrats from the House Ways and Means Committee, made the following statement:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!"

More than anyone else, Henry Morganthau, Jr., was the man most responsible for the Keynsian policies that funded the New Deal.

Despite all of its shortcomings, politicians on both sides of the aisle embraced Keynsian economics. Keynsianism, involves Congress appropriating and spending money targeted toward programs designed to address problems. Often, even when the efficacy of a government program is dubious, spending has a greater political benefit than not spending. When progress toward solving problems is not likely to be had, politicians will settle for the optics of appearing to be doing something constructive. It is in this way that government spending becomes a crutch or an addiction for both the politician and the constituent. In the absence of a better answer, spending on poorly designed and ineffective government programs became deeply entrenched into our government structure and body politic. With Reagan, there seemed to finally be an answer coming from the right. An answer that not only worked, but seemed popular. In his bid for re-election in 1984, Ronald Reagan won a 49 state landslide. But Reagan's success was limited to macroeconomic policy. He did little to reform the Progressive welfare state and its mentality of government dependency. That would come six years after Reagan left office.

1994: THE REAGAN VICTORY IN THE 'BATTLE OF IDEAS'

In 1994, with a newly minted Democrat President in the White House, Bill Clinton, the mid-term elections witnessed an historic event. The Republican Party won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Led by Newt Gingrich, a Republican Progressive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, Gingrich proposed a "Contract with America." This was the conservatives response to those many consecutive decades of dysfunctional left progressive programs that were rotting due to poor design and moral hazard.

After several attempts, the Contract with America was signed into law by Bill Clinton. Welfare rolls and government dependency was cut in half. People formerly on the government dole were employed and self sufficient. Not everyone celebrated the success of the Contract with America. Its success revealed just how deeply entrenched welfare statists had become.

When governments establish bureaucracies and programs, those bureaucracies and programs develop constituents. When those bureaucracies and programs are aimed at solving a social ill, like poverty, a counter-intuitive dynamic can result: if the problem were solved, there would be no need for the program or bureau. This runs counter to the way people think and behave.

A bureau created to address poverty will cultivate a constituency comprised of the poor. How would such a bureau measure its success? Would it measure it by the number of people it could find who are eligible for their program? Or would it measure success by how many people it lifted out of poverty, away from government dependency and toward self sufficiency?Experience has shown us that bureaucracies behave much like people do and strive for self-preservation at a minimum. This is not surprising since bureaucracies are comprised of people.

This presents us with a gigantic problem. From the early 20th century until the present day, the Federal government has been shaped by a permanent bureaucracy, largely put in place by Left Progressives to address certain domestic social problems. Over several generations, those programs and bureaus have created an entrenched constituency invested in the perpetuation of the social problems as much or more than their resolution. This contradiction and its side effects are exacerbated by poorly designed programs which fail to achieve their goals and often create permanent dependent constituents.

If this were the only problem, Americans would still have their hands full. Ronald Reagan's Presidency and the later Contract with America, have clearly cut a pathway toward correcting this problem. The challenge is not only in government itself. Tens of millions of Americans have been raised on the notion that government will be their caretaker and they have been taught to feel entitled to it. The Contract with America began to reverse that thinking until 2006, when the Democrats retook the House and Senate and worked quickly to undo all those reforms.

The "Battle of Ideas" ended with the consecutive successes of the Reagan economic policy and the Contract with America. From that moment in the late 1990s forward, the political atmosphere in America turned toxic. Americans noticed its toxicity, but seemed less observant as to its proximate cause. Focusing on personalities of political leaders and less on policy, most of the public failed to notice something a few political observers couldn't miss: Conservative solutions worked far better than Progressive ones. As the 20th century came to a close, the Progressive Left hardly felt the need to panic. Clinton was a successful two-term President, even though his administration was plagued with scandal. The economy prospered greatly while he was President, owing to much good fortune: the continuation of Reagan era economic policy, the "Peace Dividend" resulting from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist bloc, and the advent of the internet. With the 2000 Presidential election just over the horizon and Vice President Al Gore, the heir apparent to Clinton, the Progressive Left was unconcerned their dominance on the American political landscape would be challenged. It didn't work out that way.

THE GREAT DIVIDE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF LEFT PROGRESSIVES

The 2000 Presidential race will go down in history as the closest race ever. George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by acquiring just one more electoral vote than needed to win, 271. The controversy was made even greater by the fact that Bush's brother was governor of the State of Florida, where a recount dragged on for weeks until the Supreme Court decided that the race was over and Bush won Florida by just over 500 votes and with it, the Presidency. It was a very bitter pill to swallow for the Democrats.

In politics, grudges can last a very long time and the 2000 race was no exception. Today, 17 years later, many Democrats still believe Bush was not legitimately elected President. The division resulting from the 2000 race had a wider impact than it would ordinarily have for reasons soon to be described. Inasmuch as Bush was thought to have been fraudulently elected, everything Bush did while President was also thought to be fraudulent as well. Eight months into his Presidency, the 9/11 attacks and the national response to it, brought Americans together briefly. That unity was shattered after the United States failed to find an active WMD program in Iraq. Democrats sensing weakness, accused the President of lying in order to draw the country into a war in Iraq, an extremely serious charge. Such a thing, if true, is traitorous. Although this charge whipped up many Democrat supporters into a frothy frenzy, they weren't serious. In 2006, after the Democrats took back control of both the House and Senate from the Republicans, they never took any steps toward impeaching President Bush. It's difficult to imagine why they wouldn't after accusing the President of being a traitor.

The issue of the Iraq WMDs served to radicalize the Democrat Party from a left leaning party comprised of a mix of moderate so called "blue dog" Democrats, Liberals and Left Progressives. By the 2006 mid-term elections, the party was firmly in control of the most extreme elements of the Left Progressives. Even the Democrats' 2000 Vice Presidential nominee, Joe Lieberman, was considered "too conservative" for their party and banished from it. Less than a handful of years earlier, Democrats thought Lieberman was good enough to be President, if anything untoward were to happen to Al Gore.

When the 2008 election cycle was in full swing, Americans wanted change. More than change of party, Americans were restless and wanted more drastic change. The Democrats were primed to nominate a full blown Leftist Progressive. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama met that requirement, but Obama was a fresh face, whereas Clinton was a well known quantity. Obama defeated Clinton and won the Presidency easily over a sclerotic John McCain.

When Obama assumed the Presidency in 2009, the economy was hemorrhaging jobs and the contraction of GDP in the most recent quarter was greater than had been seen in decades. In that crisis, the President was given great leeway to boost the economy. But Obama was hardly an experienced veteran in national politics or macroeconomic theory. If anything, Obama was a street organizing academic from Chicago. That's where he had the most experience and that's the experience and background he relied on. The key members of Obama's cabinet and the plethora of other economic advisers were all out of the academic world with few, if any, having any business experience upon which to rely. It was a recipe waiting to become an unmitigated disaster. All the components for a catastrophic policy failure were present:

• An inexperienced leftist ideologue in the Presidency
• A team of advisers who were mostly inexperienced leftist ideologues, as well.
• All of them wedded to the failed notion of Keynsian solutions
• All of them true believers in the cause of Left Progressivism
• A country deep in crisis

Within the first month of being in office, President Obama passed a Stimulus Package without a single Republican vote. He could do that because the Democrats controlled the House with a comfortable margin and the Democrats held a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. The Stimulus package cost more in a single year than either war in Iraq and Afghanistan had cost from the day those two conflicts began until that time. This enormous expenditure was supposed to stimulate the economy to robust growth and regenerate millions of jobs. Of course, it didn't.

Compounding injury upon insult, a large portion of the Stimulus Package's appropriations became part of the baseline budget for the agencies receiving the funding. This meant that a large share of the Stimulus Money would be spent out of federal agencies year after year until the Congress passed a new budget. This was Keynsianism on a scale we have never witnessed. By the time Obama left office in 2017, he had doubled the national debt, adding nearly $10 trillion dollars to the total without much to show for it. The economy had not grown. Low wage private sector jobs were created, but not the kind of jobs needed to sustain a growing economy. This grand experiment in Leftist Progressive economics was a catastrophic failure.

Obama's Left Progressive experimentation was only just beginning. The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, was supposed to insure all Americans without disrupting those who already had insurance and doctors and preferred what they had. That promise turned out to be a fraud.

PROGRESSIVISM'S SECOND AMERICAN FAILURE

By the 2010 mid-term elections, the Democrats lost in historic landslides at every level of government. State legislative chambers switch control, Republicans were back in control in the House and many governorships were lost to the Republicans. Despite admitting his party was "shellacked", Obama never moderated; a sign of a true believing ideologue. Conventional wisdom blamed anger over the passage of Obama's health care overhaul, The Affordable Care Act(ACA), or Obamacare, as the reason for such a sweeping loss of seats. But voter anger over the ACA hardly explains losses at the state legislative level. The reasons lay deeper. Voters were losing confidence in the elected political leadership's ability to effectively address issues of concern. The 2010 mid-term elections was a statement to the Left Progressives of the Democrat party that voters didn't like the direction the country was heading. Those kinds of messages, however, are lost on elitist ideologues like Barack Obama who zealously believe in their ideological prescriptions. It would be one thing if those prescriptions had never been attempted, but they had been tried previously in the US and elsewhere, and simply didn't work.

Herein lies the problem with true believing ideologues: No amount of failure deters them. They pursue their ideological agenda with a religious fervor. Their failures are inevitably accompanied by alibis. One excellent example are the true believers in Marxism. Even through the fall of the USSR and the rest of the Eastern European Marxist states, true believers today claim those nations weren't truly Marxist at all. In fact, they believe they never were Marxist. This is denial because for the seven decades the USSR was in existence, no Marxist ideologues anywhere were making such claims. Only when the USSR collapsed and more liberal, capitalistic and open societies took their place, did the ideologues make their dishonest claim.

The Progressive Left in the United States is every bit as wedded to their ideas as those heartbroken European Marxists trying to make sense out of a failed and corrupt ideology. The danger comes when those true believers have access to the levers of power.

WHAT CAUSES AN IDEOLOGY TO SUCCEED OR FAIL

Ideologies when used as organizing principles for societies, succeed or fail to the extent they are successful interpreting basic human nature. Karl Marx failed to properly interpret the basic human condition.

Marx's ambition was to explain all of reality with what he called scientific socialism. If correct, his theories of Nature could apply to human society, too. His theories were provably false, however.

Essentially, Marx believed all of Nature, including human society, was governed by three laws. These were the Laws of Opposites, Negation and Transformation. Without getting too buried in the weeds, these laws were supposed to explain motion, life cycles, proliferation and change. Marx believed his laws could be observed and applied to the behavior of atoms as well as humans in society. Rather than explain Nature's laws, Marx's Laws only presumed much of what it supposedly claimed to explain. Furthermore, Marx's theories of motion, proliferation and change were repudiated by observations to the contrary. In other words, science itself proved "scientific socialism" to be false.

Perhaps Marx's biggest mistake was believing human nature, if it evolves at all, can evolve quickly and sufficiently enough to be noticeable. Adherents to Marx's philosophy have gone even one step further and believed human nature itself could be engineered. The attempts to do so in the 20th century led to the death of over 100 million people.

Progressivism suffers from the same malady as Marxism, but is decidedly less virulent. Progressives believe in progress, naturally. But Progressives never define progress. They only tell us it's inevitable, but they can't tell us the direction we are going. Progressives also seem to have internal contradictions in their ideology. For example, if humans are progressing, then we should expect social ills like racism to eventually wither away. If such were the case then laws protecting certain racial minorities could one day be repealed. Progressives find this idea repellent and argue that we must always have anti-racial discrimination laws because they say we will always have racial discrimination. But if humanity is truly progressing, racial discrimination must eventually come to an end. If Progressives assume that racial discrimination will always be with us, then what is Progressiveism really all about? Progressivism seems to be rather subjective and political in this regard.

Also, it is not quite true that human society is always progressing. During the Roman Empire, Roman homes had running water and indoor plumbing. After the Roman Empire fell in the late 5th Century, Europe was without indoor plumbing for a thousand years. That advance in technology was lost for an entire millenium. So, it can hardly be said that human society makes continual forward progress. Like Marxism, Progressive ideology also has a fatal flaw.

Conservatism works because it's not an ideology in the truest sense of the word and it comes closest to the pin in its interpretation of basic human nature. How does it do this? Well, first of all, Conservatism doesn't have a view of how the world ought to be. It understands the world as it is. This is very different from both Marxism and Progressivism, which have a very specific view of what society should look like. Secondly, Conservatism acknowledges that human beings will always act in their own self interest, at least as a primary impulse. Our first impulse as human beings is not to act for the collective, as the Utopian Socialist or Marxist might say, but for the individual self. Finally, unlike Marxism and Progressivism, Conservatism does not hold that human nature is changeable. You could say that Conservatives find that human nature today is not very different from those of our ancestors who wrote on cave walls 10,000 years ago.

Conservatism, though not perfect, works best because it interprets the world it sees rather than to change the world. It organizes societies around Man's basic nature to act in his self interest, rather than endeavor to change Man's nature into something else. Economic and social relationships are organized around this reality. The results are largely harmonious, prosperous and successful societies. Conservatism has its imperfections, but when compared to the problems in Marxist or Progressive societies, they are minor.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

Everything I have pointed out here is known to the Left Progressives, Marxists, Communists and others on the Left. They know their ideas have failed, but they have not accepted failure. At the same time, they are well aware of the success of Conservatism. But remember, to an ideologue, their ideology is like a religion. They aren't going to abandon it. Instead of retreating into a period of introspection and reflection, they are doing all they can to seize as much power through indoctrination and propaganda as possible. Their efforts become for hysterical and radical and in some cases even violent because their only weapon against ideas that actually work for the betterment of society is fear and intimidation whose direct object is to silence the opposition.

The great social experiment into Left Progressivist government has gone on for almost 100 years. Along the way, there have been some good ideas like weekends, and paid vacation time for employees, but many bad ideas too, like Prohibition. It is time for the Progressives to move aside and let Conservatism work instead of impeding it. They aren't likely to do so because they have learned from the success of the Ronald Reagan Presidency and the later Reagan Revolution in Congress that Conservative solutions work and they represent an existential threat to the Progressive Left agenda which has been a dismal failure for many decades. So, in some sense, their fanatical hysteria understandable. They know that Conservative policy implementation would be very likely to be successful and gain broad popular support. Their opposition to Conservatism has a great deal to do with preserving their power and less with the good of society. Progressives are in both political parties. It's part of the reason so little ever seems to change in our national politics.

The principles of the Progressive Left amounts to a counter-revolution to our Founding. They seek to fundamentally transform the United States into a centrally planned authoritarian state controlled by one political party.