The View From 1776

Liberal-progressive-socialism and its handmaiden, the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis, claim the mantle of science.  But, as there is exactly zero proof of their doctrine, and judging from the intense, irrational passion with which their believers attack all questioners, we can conclude that liberal-progressive-socialism and Darwinism are not science, but aspects of a religion.

Responding to Hillary Clinton, Racist Fellow-Traveler, Bob Sorensen emailed me this link to one of his postings.  As he said in his message, “Long ago, I learned that if there is no foundation, no Creator, then there are no rules and you can make them up as you go. If there is a Creator, then he makes the rules and we’d better find out what he has to say.”

Darwinian evolutionary doctrine denies the existence of any timeless standard of morality, asserting that morality (like the Constitution) evolves from day to day in response to the changing environment of public opinion.  Opinion in the liberal-progressive, Darwinian religion, naturally, is to be controlled and manipulated by the mainstream media led by the New York Times. 

That is what Mikhail Bakunin pictured in 1872 when he stated,

The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones! 

(see What a New New Deal Means For You).

One of the most horrendous doctrines to emerge from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis was the eugenics movement, instituted by his cousin, Sir Francis Galton.  Today’s birth control and abortion, according to apologists for abortion, are merely eugenics updated.

Eugenicists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, denying God as the creator and designer of the universe, asserted that evolution of species was, according to the Darwinian hypothesis, without design.  Unstructured evolution among humans, however, could result in mongrelization of the human race, they said.  Eugenics thus may be described as Darwinian evolution in a hurry.

In the eugenics hypothesis, it was the socialist intellectual planners’ duty (while perfecting human nature and society, as well as harmonizing the economy) to weed out “undesirable” types of human beings.  Readers will recognize this arrogance and arbitrary presumption of power in today’s EPA pretensions to control what automobiles we are permitted to own, how our homes must be designed, heated, and cooled, as well as the foods we will be allowed to eat.

Perhaps the most notorious literary work on eugenics published in the United States was Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was a prominent New York City resident whose bequest led to founding of the Bronx Zoo.  In his book, Grant identified the northern European, nordic races as the key races in humanity’s development. 

Hitler used the eugenics theory, indeed quoted Madison Grant’s book, to justify his Aryan Master Race theories and the Holocaust.  Mr. Grant’s book was introduced in evidence in the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trial as a defense for one the defendants.

Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a racist and an ardent eugenicist who viewed birth control as simply a way to reduce the fecundity of those she considered undesirables: immigrant Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and others from central and southern Europe. 

More recently, advocates of birth control have expanded the concept of eugenics to include abortion.  Conservatives should be happy, they said, that abortion theoretically reduces the number of children born to single-parent families.

Read Mrs. Clinton Can’t Defend Patron Saint of Planned Parenthood, by Mona Charen.

It’s hard to say whether Hillary Clinton knew the racist history of Margaret Sanger when she accepted her award with fulsome praise for Sanger, who is today better known as a patron saint of sexual promiscuity.  Let’s hope that, having been challenged on the matter, Mrs. Clinton will be more restrained in the future.

In its headline story for the April 23, 2009, edition, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Lewis Testifies U.S. Urged Silence on Deal
Bank of America Chief Says Bernanke, Paulson Barred Disclosure of Merrill Woes Because of Fears for Financial System

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co.—a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA—according to testimony by Kenneth Lewis, the bank’s chief executive…

As part of his testimony, a transcript of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lewis said the government wanted him to keep quiet while the two sides negotiated government funding to help BofA absorb Merrill and its huge losses.

Under normal circumstances, banks must alert their shareholders of any materially significant financial hits. But these weren’t normal times: Late last year, Wall Street was crumbling and BofA faced intense government pressure to buy Merrill to keep the crisis from spreading. Disclosing losses at Merrill—which eventually totaled $15.84 billion for the fourth quarter—could have given BofA’s shareholders an opportunity to stop the deal and let Merrill collapse instead.

Maggie’s Farm website provides a link to a similar story of government regulators’ pressure to lie to the public, pressure which may have played a role in the suicide of Freddie Mac’s CFO:

Freddie Mac CFO found hanged in basement of his VA home

My thanks to David Airth, a frequent poster of comments on this website, for bringing to my attention an interesting analysis that was reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

That article describes the contention of economist Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, that neither the housing bubble, nor Wall Street greed was the main effectuator of the economic downturn besetting the world.  He notes, instead, that our current recession and others since the end of World War II have been triggered by price increases in oil, which simultaneously affect the entire economy.

While not disagreeing with Mr Reynolds about the negative impact of oil price increases, I would step back a few paces to examine what induced the postwar increases in oil prices.  In every case, oil price increases were preceded, and by implication, caused in major part, by surges in the dollar money supply. 

OPEC was formally organized in 1960 after President Eisenhower imposed import quotas on oil from Venezuela and the Persian Gulf.  The punishing oil shortage imposed by OPEC in 1973 was both a political move to undercut American foreign policy support for Israel, and a reaction to the inflation-caused declining purchasing power of the dollar, the currency in which most overseas producers were paid.

Measured in 2008 dollars (i.e., adjusting for inflation), the price of oil was very stable, around $15 to $20 per barrel, from 1931 until 1971, when the inflationary effect of President Johnson’s Great Society socialist welfare-state entitlements programs began to manifest itself.  The same pattern was exhibited in the oil price spike beginning in 2005, as the Fed continued to keep the money-supply spigot wide open.

In addition to inflation-induced declines in the value of the dollar, of course, oil prices were pushed upward by surging consumption in China and by the uncertain availability of Persian Gulf oil supplies because of the Iraq War and rising tensions with Iran.

Nonetheless, the dollar’s loss of purchasing power because of the Fed’s actions was a major trigger in the run-up of oil prices.  Measured in ounces (actually small fractions of an ounce) of gold, the price per barrel of oil was almost exactly the same in 2007 as in 2000.  During that same period, however, the price of oil in dollars leaped 250% to 3.5 times the price in 2000 (Wall Street Journal; Oil and the Dollar, January 4, 2008; Page A10).

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
In Meetings, Spy Panels’ Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say
By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers 
Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page A01

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Whatever its proclaimed intentions for the betterment of society, socialism must diminish your range of individual political and economic freedoms, transferring them to state bureaucrats who promulgate regulations. 

One socialist aim, for example, is to reduce or eliminate unemployment, a major concern near the end of World War II.  At that time, the British socialist Labour Party was planning its takeover of government, and Friedrich Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom” to describe what lay ahead for the British people.  Sir William Beveridge, a Labour Party leader, candidly stated the basic fact of the socialized welfare state: 

…the State, in [attempting to guarantee full employment] is not wholly master of events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals……the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment without full powers.

In other words, central planning necessary for reducing unemployment, imposing socialized medicine and “green” environmental regulations, along with compelling businesses to permit labor union takeovers of their workforces, cannot become effective without subordinating the rights of individuals to the goals of state planners.  The result is a degree of servility on the road to serfdom.

Today we are moving at a faster pace in that direction (for some specifics, see A Jackboot at Home, an Olive Branch Abroad).

At the root level is a conflict between the Judeo-Christian ethos of western civilization and the paradigm of “scientific” socialism that unfolded in the 19th century.

Western civilization was founded upon Judeo-Christian morality that had become dominant by the time of the collapse of the western Roman Empire.  The common bond among European kingdoms and fiefdoms was the embodiment of that morality in the Christian religion.  From the fifth century until late in the 19th century it was accurate to refer to western Europe as Christendom.

In contrast to the socialist collectivism of the welfare state, which has increasingly attracted the allegiance of Americans since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the Judeo-Christian ethic focuses upon individual moral responsibility in our daily dealing with our families, with our neighbors, with fellow members of our churches and synagogues, and with our local communities.  The core of Hebraic and Christian teaching, found in the Old and New testaments of the Bible, is love of God, which emanates in personal moral responsibility for fair dealing and helping those in need.  Under the Judeo-Christian ethic every individual has a direct relationship with God, a relationship that implies person accountability for acting or failing to act.  Humans must exercise their God-given free will, they must make choices between spiritual life and the spiritual death inherent in philosophical materialism.  Humanity’s survival requires that spiritual needs, love of God, take primacy over material things.

Social ills, in the materialistic religion of socialism, result from the structure of society.  Those ills, according to liberal-progressive-socialist doctrine, can be remedied by the political state’s taking from those who have more, and giving it to favored classes.  In this paradigm, the political state is humanity’s ultimate savior.

One implication of this paradigm is the elimination of personal responsibility and free will to make real choices.  Instead, politically favored classes of citizens are entitled to share in society’s production of goods and services, solely on the basis of need, which, of course, is to be defined by bureaucratic planners.

This means that the socialist political state deals with collective abstractions, such as “the poor” or “the oppressed.” When individual human suffering is reduced to such grand abstractions, it becomes easy for liberal-progressive-socialists to pat themselves on the back for their humanity when they do no more than denounce businessmen and conservative politicians in social gatherings and street demonstrations.  Socialism is a religion that makes few demands on its adherents for personal sacrifice or involvement beyond reading the New York Times editorial pages.

Among the benefits doled out by the political state there is no place for spiritual needs.  Socialism is a materialistic religion that sees humans as merely receptors of physical pleasure and pain.  By giving or withholding material things that can be purchased with money, the political state can control its citizens when they have been reduced to dependency upon the state for medical care, food, clothing, housing, jobs, and education. 

That was the insight of Otto von Bismarck, the German Chancellor who created the German Empire in the 1860s under Prussian domination.  Bismarck was a member of the Prussian landed aristocracy and no friend of the Reichstag’s majority socialist party.  Nonetheless, he instituted the world’s first welfare-state benefits programs, because, he said, people who became dependent upon the political state could be herded like cattle.

In sharp contrast, under the Judeo-Christian ethic of western civilization, as our Declaration of Independence puts it, even the ruler is subject to the laws of Nature’s God.  God is the higher power to Whom all of us, rulers and ruled, must answer.

But under liberal-progressive-socialism, we are to worship the goddess Reason.  Having no higher power than the minds of intellectuals to answer to, state planners have potentially unlimited power to tyrannize citizens, as we saw in Hitler’s National Socialism and in the Soviet Union.  That is why Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated description of life under socialism is called “The Road to Serfdom.”

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under socialism:

“The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”

The Wall Street Journal reports (Obama Open to Probe of Bush Officials Who Devised Interrogations, April 21, 2009):

President Barack Obama left open the possibility of legally pursuing the Bush administration officials who formulated the policies that led to “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which critics have called torture.

In the 1987 Senate nomination proceedings for Judge Robert Bork, liberal-progressive-socialist interest groups mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign to block Judge Bork’s nomination.  Senator Ted Kennedy led the lynching party in Senatorial hearings. 

No one could challenge Judge Bork’s qualifications for elevation to the Court.  He had served with distinction as a Yale law professor, as United States Solicitor General, and as a judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Opposition came down to a single issue: Judge Bork was on record, in common with a very large percentage of the nation’s constitutional law scholars, that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling was based on very shaky legal and Constitutional grounds.  The Court “discovered” a hitherto unsuspected Constitutional right to unfettered abortion obscured within the penumbras of the shadows of the Constitution.  Translation: a majority of the Justices, on sociological, not legal grounds, believed that there ought to be an abortion right, so they artificially implanted one in the Constitution, completely disregarding the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which historically had reserved regulation of such matters to the states and to local jurisdictions.  Even liberal-progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a former feminist rights attorney, wrote that the nation would have been better served had the Court left the abortion issue to state legislatures.

President Obama’s possible criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials is of the same material.  Radical liberal-progressive-socialist voters and members of Congress want to criminalize honest, best efforts of the Bush administration to protect the American people from terrorist attacks such as those that destroyed the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001.  They believe that, in a socialized world of “hope” and “change,” there ought to be no need for rough interrogations to elicit intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks.

Ideologically, liberal-progressives support, on the home front, any measure to promote social decadence, from drug abuse to sexual promiscuity.  On the international front, they fail to understand the stark reality and necessity of protecting our national interests, often with harsh measures.  For them, popularity with overseas street mobs is the only currency of worth.  Hence their subordination of homeland security to feel-good overseas relations, at any price.

Because liberal-progressive-socialists believe that the Constitution is subject to a sort of Darwinian evolution under the pressure of public opinion shifts, they are comfortable with judicial activism and with ex post facto criminalization of legal and policy advice from administration officials, provided that their targets are precepts or people they don’t like: Judeo-Christian morality or conservative political officials.

If the Obama administration does elect to pursue criminal prosecutions of Bush administration officials for authorizing interrogation techniques - which, at the time, were regularly reported to and approved by the same Democrat/Socialist members of Congress who now demand the heads of those who briefed them - woe betide Democrat/Socialists when the Republicans regain the presidency and control of Congress.

Our ideological civil war has deepened in intensity and bitterness since the Democrat/Socialists started it.  God, if it fits His design, can end it.  Or He may be using the conflict as a way to punish all of us for becoming self-centered consumers of material goods and worshippers of the political state as our presumed ultimate source of social well being.