The View From 1776

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As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against the Constitution:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had expressly disavowed any ideas of preferential treatment for classes of citizens, aiming for a color-blind society with equal opportunity for all. Yet, only a year later, President Johnson declared to students at Howard University’s graduation ceremony that the “next and most profound stage of the battle for civil rights” will be “not just equality as a right and theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Delivering literal equality, as an entitlement, regardless of whether individuals in the covered social classes had ever worked or even tried to find jobs, would require the government to contravene the equal-treatment provisions of the just-passed Civil Rights Act as well as the 14th Amendment, which mandates due process of law and equal protection under the laws. The Federal judiciary, by then largely staffed with liberal-progressive-socialists, were prepared to ignore this legal conflict and to sanction President Johnson’s new salient toward egalitarian social justice.

Going on welfare, in effect, became a career choice. Welfare “clients” were entitled to welfare benefits and they owed nothing to society. Since in socialist theory it was society’s fault that they were needy, they had no obligation to seek work or to limit the number of their illegitimate children. Nor was there any reason, moral or legal, that they and their progeny should not collect these benefits forever. Liberal-progressives, harking back to FDR’s “second bill of rights” declaration in 1944, called this a Constitutional right.

However much traditionalists deplore this ethos, their revulsion does not mean that society should ignore the plight of the less fortunate, that social welfare measures are inherently bad. It means simply that it doesn’t work to deal with human misery by telling the unfortunate that they have a Constitutional right to a large part of the fruit of other people’s labor, and that they owe nothing in return to society.

Michael Harrington’s 1968 Toward a Democratic Left: A Radical Program for a New Majority expressed the sense of the Great Society paradigm.

Even in a society based on private economic power, the Government can be an agency of social, rather than corporate, purpose… This does not require a fundamental transformation of the system. It does, however, mean that the society will democratically plan “uneconomic” allocations of significant resources… Under such conditions it would be possible to realize full— and meaningful— employment for all those ready and able to work. Going beyond the quantities of the New Deal, the economy could be stimulated by promoting the affluence of the public sector rather than by tax cuts, and in the process millions of creative jobs can be designed to better the nation’s education, health, leisure, and the like. Within twenty years such a policy of social investments should end all poverty, eradicate the slums and erode the economic basis of racism. And those people who are unable to work could be provided with a guaranteed annual income instead of shoddy, uncoordinated and inadequate welfare payments… The very character of modern technology, [Harvard economist John] Galbraith says, renders the old market mechanisms obsolete. In these circumstances planning is obligatory. The state must manage the economy in order to guarantee sufficient purchasing power to buy the products of the industrial system.

Now, more than forty years later, it is possible to review the actual results of the Great Society and of Mr. Harrington’s prescription. “Promoting the affluence of the public sector” as a means of stimulating the economy meant simply putting more people on the public payrolls. There is no evidence that this produced “millions of creative jobs” or did anything to eradicate poverty (or racism, if one is to believe black spokesmen like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) within the twenty years of Mr. Harrington’s expectations.

Far from eliminating poverty, Mr. Harrington’s prescription, applied in the Great Society entitlements programs, produced the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Bureau of Labor reported unemployment at 5.2% of the labor force in 1965; ten years later in 1975 the unemployment rate was 9.0%, accompanied by the worst inflation in our peacetime history.

That, of course, is much the same prescription followed by the Obama administration, with much the same negative result.

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Only liberal-progressives could feel justified in mobilizing a media campaign to incite further rioting, believing that “caring” in the abstract for “victims of oppression” trumps maintenance of law and order for the benefit of all citizens, black and white. 

Only liberal-progressives could ignore the rights of innocent residents whose property was vandalized in Ferguson and elsewhere; after all, in socialist ideology, capitalism and property ownership are evils that must be controlled or eliminated by collectivized government in the name of social justice. 

Only liberal-progressives could attribute to racism the anger of the majority of Americans when they see gangs of people in the nighttime streets looting and burning businesses of people who had nothing whatever to do with the Ferguson incident. 

Only liberal-progressives could dismiss legitimate grievances of citizens alarmed by rampant crime among young black males and the readiness of their elders to blame the white community for conduct that raises fear for the survival of our political society. 

Only liberal-progressives could sneeringly dismiss people with those concerns as racists who “cling to their Bibles and guns.”

In Class Prejudice Resurgent (New York Times, December 1, 2014), columnist David Brooks correctly observes that the Ferguson fulminations are different from civil rights issues.  He doesn’t, however, note that more fundamentally Ferguson represents refusal of liberal-progressives and their black political supporters to accept responsibility for their own actions.  Liberal-progressive hippies and flower children were fond of spiritual concepts such as karma, but failed to understand its substance: you reap what you sow.

Responding to one of liberal-progressives’ gauzy platitudes, Mr. Brooks writes:

It’s often said after events like Ferguson that we need a national conversation on race. That’s a bit true. We all need to improve our capacity for sympathetic understanding, our capacity to imaginatively place ourselves in the minds of other people with experiences different from our own. Conversation can help, though I suspect novels, works of art and books like Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” work better.

But, ultimately, we don’t need a common conversation; we need a common project. If the nation works together to improve social mobility for the poor of all races, through projects like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, then social distance will decline, classism will decline and racial prejudice will obliquely decline as well.

In a friendship, people don’t sit around talking about their friendship. They do things together. Through common endeavor people overcome difference to become friends.

Mr. Brooks’s “common endeavor” is a pipe dream. 

As I noted in Ferguson Again, the root cause is President Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society welfare state, which destroyed the cohesion of so many black families and spawned large numbers of black young men raised in single-parent, welfare-addicted households.  Liberal icon Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted at the time that the result was going to be black neighborhoods terrorized by remorseless, conscienceless young black men.  One of those was Ferguson’s Michael Brown.

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The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution because English experience under sometimes misrule by kings had made them acutely sensitive to the need to protect individuals’ traditional legal and political rights from the abuse of monarchs, mob rule, or majority vote. 

Liberal-progressive sociological theory as the guiding light for political decision has been a disaster.  Turning 180 degrees from individual Constitutional rights, it has embraced collectivization of government’s dictatorial power and fractured society into economic, racial, ethnic, and sexual constituencies.  Absorbing Karl Marx’s doctrine, liberal-progressives have actively fomented class warfare.

President Johnson’s 1960s Great Society produced riots, burning of whole sections of major cities, soaring crime rates, disintegration of education, the highest rates of illegitimacy in world history and the accompanying disintegration of the family unit as the primary educational factor in civilized society.  Along with this, we endured rampant inflation caused by government deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s excessive creation of fiat money.  Between the mid-1960s and 1982, more than half the value of people’s lifetime savings was wiped out by inflation, while we suffered some of the highest sustained rates of unemployment in our history.

In contrast, before the 1930s, the respect for Judeo-Christian principles and long-established tradition that characterized our unwritten constitution gave us the greatest degree of political liberty and the highest living standards in world history.

Even with the travails of the Depression and the advent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, the liberal jihad made few inroads with the general public against the Judeo-Christian morality of the unwritten constitution.

All of that changed decisively in the great social and political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  A reversion to the 1890s-1920s bombings that killed hundreds of people, an openly confrontational, often violent, phase of the liberal jihad had commenced.  Timeless natural law principles of the Constitution were to be replaced by evolving, evanescent public opinion, manipulated by liberal-progressive social engineers through the compliant mainstream liberal-progressive media.

Propaganda from the liberal-progressive-socialist media fostered the opinion that the United States was engaged in anti-humanitarian atrocities in the Vietnam War.  “Know nothing” students intimidated college and university administrations and seized control of college offices, classrooms, and computer centers.  President Johnson’s Great Society welfare-entitlements programs produced an unprecedented increase in violent crime, riots, and burnings of whole sections of major cities.

Public opinion became radicalized.  What would have been unacceptable conduct even a few years earlier became commonplace and worked to augment the breakdown of decorum and public order.

Media organs – movies, TV, magazines, and major city newspapers – began to abandon traditional editorial self-restraint that prevented publication of foul language and public discussion of certain subjects.  By the late-1970s, editorial standards reflected the hedonistic and iconoclastic attitudes of the younger generation and their mentors, the liberal-progressive intellectuals. The founding generation’s Judeo-Christian moral principles and the constitutional doctrine of natural law were ridiculed by the media and violently rejected by our youth.

Increasingly law came to be, not statutes enacted by elected legislative bodies, but arbitrary judicial rulings conforming to current public opinion projected in the liberal-mainstream media.  Activist court rulings gave the strong impression that liberal judges cared little about insuring people’s safety.  Their principal concern appeared to be protecting those who rebelled against established law and custom of civilized society.  Victims’ rights were reduced to secondary importance.

See David P. Goldman’s How Far Down Do You Define Deviancy in Ferguson?

This attitude was one of the underlying elements in liberal-progressive-socialist doctrine that had originated with French Revolutionary propagandist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  In his mythology of human reason as the all-powerful regulator of human society, criminals were the victims of a society that protected private property rights.  Under a government driven by the “general will,” Rousseau’s code for totalitarian rule, property would be redistributed, and once again there would be plenty for everyone.  Poverty and crime would cease to exist, because human nature would be transformed to its original benevolent state.  This myth was re-packaged by Lenin after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when he proclaimed future creation of selfless New Soviet Man, shaped by the political state to produce according to ability and take only according to need.

Viewing MSNBC’s line-up of evening commentators this week would lead one to believe that the only newsworthy events were taking place in Ferguson, MO.  And predictably the liberal-progressive overwhelming emphasis on “caring,” as opposed to respect for legal rights and social order, dominated the “news.”  Lost in these commentators’ opinion was any acknowledgement that the real cause of the entire series of Ferguson disasters was the destruction of black families by Lyndon Johnson’s “caring” Great Society.

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Robert Stapler brought to my attention David Stockman’s essay The Fed’s Paint-By-The-Numbers Delusions About The Labor Market.

Mr. Stockman documents the greatly differing kinds of jobs - too many of them part-time - and widely varying incomes associated with those jobs that are rolled into one statistic for new jobs created each month.  Obama administration spokesmen and the main stream media treat all reported new jobs as if they were parts of a homogenous statistic called employment. 

Going back to the 1930s, when Keynes’s ideas first gained a foothold in the United States, we can understand why this simplistic view of employment pervades today’s discussions.  Keynes notoriously promoted the idea that the only economic variable that counted was government spending to employ people.  What those so employed did was, in Keynes’s view, immaterial.  Hire men to dig holes one day, then fill them back up the next day, re-dig them the third day, and so on ad infinitum.  At another time, in the same vein, he suggested burying money in bottles by one crew, then unburying them by the next crew.

In short, the vast complexity of an economy, ranging from mining and lumbering, to producing steel, cooper, and aluminum, to drilling for petroleum and natural gas, to production of manufacturing machinery, to railroads and trucking, to wholesale distribution, to retail stores, to software coding, to restaurants and schools, is looked upon by the Federal Reserve and by Congress and the administration as a single thing that can be controlled simply by the amount of deficit spending by the government and the amount of fiat money created by the Fed to fund deficit spending.

The record, as Mr. Stockman lays it out, shows that meddling by Congress and the Fed during recent decades has failed Keynesian expectations and, instead, made the employment picture steadily worse.

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