And they’re not going away. Increasingly, Americans are pressing our leaders to be honest about how corrupt our state and federal governments have become, and how much of the current bureaucracy must be uprooted if our nation hopes to survive.
Why “2 + 2=4” Will Be the Most Important (and Most Controversial) Slogan of This Decade
Writing shortly after the defeat of Nazism, as the world faced the rapidly expanding threat of Soviet totalitarianism, Albert Camus wrote in his novel, The Plague, “Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”
Camus was describing more than the threat of dictatorship. He was describing the power of conformity that coerces people into denying the truth and saying things that are patently false but politically correct.
Similarly, the fraudulent party slogans the citizen must believe in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, are described by the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, as “2 + 2=5.” Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
The Polish people used the same 2 + 2=4 slogan in their fight against Poland’s Communist dictatorship after Pope John Paul II’s visit there in 1979. They were asserting that the truth would come out no matter what the dictatorship said or did. Ultimately, after a decade of struggle, the dictatorship collapsed and was replaced in free elections.
America is not a dictatorship, but we are facing a ruthless secular-socialist machine that repeats falsehood after falsehood and then intimidates—through cries of racism, hating the poor, or other spurious accusations—anyone who might challenge their lies. In order to defeat the machine once and for all, we must take inspiration from the brave Communist-era dissidents. We are already emerging from our pattern of self-deception, but we must accelerate this process; we must even more consistently, even more emphatically tell the truth in the face of enormous pressure to conform to the politically correct lies that now dominate our discourse.
Consider two examples where we are still reluctant to speak the common-sense truth in the face of the willful obfuscations of our leaders.
2 + 2=11: Why it has been impossible to accurately and honestly discuss immediate threats to American security
All the passion spent debating the proper U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan misses the larger reality about the war we are in and the threats we face.
Afghanistan is one theater in a larger war, much like Guadalcanal and Sicily were during World War II. They were important battles, but no one ever confused them with being the war itself.
It’s a mistake to discuss our goals and strategies for Afghanistan without first having established our goals and strategies for the larger war—it’s like trying to understand Guadalcanal without looking at Japan, or trying to understand Sicily while ignoring Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing. Today, it is impossible to have a 2 + 2=4 conversation about the most pressing threats to U.S. security.
I have been illustrating this to audiences by relating a series of incidents: terrorist killings in Fort Hood; the arrest of five young American men in Pakistan who were trying to join al Qaeda to fight against America; and the arrests of would-be terrorists in Denver, Detroit, and New York.
I note that I will focus on a common characteristic of these stories that is politically acceptable to discuss. “Do you realize,” I ask, “that not one of these people was a Rotarian?”
Audiences break up laughing as they understand the key point. The one common characteristic of these cases was that the terrorists were Islamists. Yet today we are so dominated by politically correct apologists, even for terrorists, that we cannot have an honest dialogue about the true scale of the threat to our survival.
We have to stop talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theaters of the war on Islamism in isolation. Unless we honestly discuss the irreconcilable wing of Islam, we will never develop what Roosevelt and Churchill would have called a grand national strategy. And without that, we are unlikely to win the war.
Once we have the courage to insist that 2 + 2=4 in national security, we can rapidly develop a bold strategy to preserve our civilization against those who would destroy it. Until then we are likely to flounder and risk failure.
2 + 2=97: The housing bubble crash
Here’s a quick 2 + 2 experiment: tell a friend you will give her the first half of a sentence and you want her to finish it.
The first half is, “If you can’t afford to buy a house . . . ”
Most people will respond, “don’t buy it” or “rent one.”
Americans overwhelmingly understand that putting people into houses they can’t afford is an invitation to disaster. Yet for a quarter century our governmental policy has repudiated this common-sense wisdom. Prodded by liberal guilt and a belief among many leaders in redistributionist, big-government policies, our government adopted ever-more aggressive and unsustainable housing policies. Prospective home owners were told:
If you do not have any credit, government will find a way.
If you cannot save for a down payment, government will waive the requirement.
If you cannot afford to pay the principal, government will give you an interest-only loan for the first three years.
If you cannot even afford full interest payments, government will give you a below market rate.
With one person, these policies might tragically lead to his or her bankruptcy. As national policy, they mired millions of families in debt, created a housing bubble, and sparked a financial collapse.
This was certainly a policy failure. But more significant, it was a cultural failure—too many Americans, against their better judgment, bought into the idea that they could get something for nothing.
Yet how often, if ever, have the leaders of either party admitted the housing market collapse and subsequent financial meltdown stemmed from destructive cultural values exacerbated by bad politics and bad government?
Ironically, the politicians whose policies contributed the most to the housing mess—left-wing Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd—ended up as chairs of the committees tasked with fixing the crisis. And of course, none of them will acknowledge the cultural roots of the problem, or the many ways their own demands for aggressive lending intensified the crisis.
They added 2 + 2 and got 97.
OUR MOST POWERFUL WEAPON IS THE TRUTH
Despite the enormous challenge of defeating the secular-socialist machine, I am an optimist for one simple reason: we have the truth on our side.
Free people insisting on telling the truth have changed history. Just a few years after Pope John Paul II visited Poland, President Reagan gave his famous speech in Berlin exclaiming, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!” The end of the speech was little noticed, but in many ways it was even more profound than his challenge to Gorbachev. Reagan said:
Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront.
Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower’s one major flaw: treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere, that sphere that towers over all Berlin, the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.
As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: “This wall will fall. Beliefs b
ecome reality.”
Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall, for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
Those who would reject the truth about the totalitarian nature of big government, the truth that our rights come from our Creator, the truth about the importance of the rule of law, the truth about the deep cost of corruption—they should reread this speech and explain why they think we Americans are less willing to stand up for the truth than were Germans, Poles, or countless others during the dark days of Communism.
The secular-socialist machine can be defeated. We can put an end to self-serving, big-government corruption from Sacramento to Washington, D.C.
The first step is to refuse to be silenced.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Replace Not Reform
After we fully adopt the 2 + 2=4 rule and truthfully confront our problems head-on, we need to identify where to begin dismantling the secular-socialist machine. And that starting point is the bureaucracies where it hides.
Many of our state and federal bureaucracies are obsolete, having been founded on left-wing principles that simply do not work in the real world and that contradict traditional American values. Furthermore, the career bureaucrats who run them are often left-wing activists who aim to exploit their positions to reshape society—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a prime example.
A core element of the secular-socialist machine, these bureaucracies are impervious to reform, as demonstrated by twelve years of largely unsuccessful reform efforts by a Republican House and twenty years of futile attempts by Republican presidents. As previously described, the defeat of reform attempts by governors like California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger shows these bureaucracies can be just as entrenched on the state level.
Simply put, bureaucracies have learned how to outlast elected officials and any reforms they may attempt. Some bureaucrats express this attitude with an arrogant term for political appointees to whom they nominally report: “the summer help.” And any reform efforts that are actually attempted get stymied by the nearly impenetrable layers of process regulations, such as personnel selection, security clearance, public comment periods, and rules about what can and cannot be done.
To save America from the secular-socialist machine, it is not enough to expose and repudiate the Left in the next two elections. After all, once we win the elections, we still have to run the government effectively. If we fail, as Republicans did this past decade, the machine will simply bide its time until it regains power.
To succeed, it will not be enough simply to try to reform our failed bureaucracies. Instead, we must fundamentally replace them.
The difference between a reform and a replacement effort is not just rhetoric; it leads to drastically different conclusions about the scale of the effort. A system of replacement requires a new approach, new language, and a new majority coalition of citizens.
What’s wrong with a reform strategy? Consider the White House czar system. It is an unconstitutional centralization of power in the hands of appointed, unaccountable bureaucrats. It is guaranteed to increase corruption, lead to political cronyism, and give the president unprecedented—and un-American—power to manipulate, coerce, and bribe people.
The solution is to eliminate the White House czar system, not to reform it.
The EPA has become an engine of undemocratic bureaucracy filled with people who seek to impose their fanatical views on an unwilling American population. The EPA and its entire regulation-litigation, Washington-centered, command-and-control bureaucracy needs to be replaced.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the multi-trillion dollar government-guaranteed housing agencies, are so thoroughly politicized and preside over such irresponsible lending policies that they need to be replaced with smaller, private companies operating without government guarantees, whose leaders focus on making a profit, not manipulating politicians.
Watching Bob Compton’s movie 2 Million Minutes about high schools in China, India, and America is a sobering warning of the risk to America’s future competitiveness posed by the failures of our education system. Killing all attempts at meaningful reform, the union-dominated public education bureaucracy sacrifices our children’s learning for its own financial interests. Despite the howls of outrage sure to ensue, that bureaucracy needs to be replaced, not reformed.
REPLACING POLICY
Along with the bureaucracies, we need to thoroughly replace failing policies with ones that work. This is not a new or impossible goal. I have been involved in numerous policy replacement efforts over the last thirty years.
Under President Reagan’s leadership in 1981, we replaced the failed Keynesian tax-and-spend policies of the Carter years with a bold, three-year tax cut of 25 percent combined with dramatic deregulation, a strong-dollar federal reserve, and significant spending controls. The result was a 25-year period of continuous economic growth.
When President Reagan replaced the strategy of détente and accommodation toward the Soviet Union with a strategy of victory (or as he described the strategy, “We win, they lose”), his approach was replacement, not reform. The result was the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1996, the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed a total replacement of the failed welfare system with a work-study system that transformed the role of welfare offices from increasing dependency to helping people become productive again. With this bold change, 65 percent of welfare recipients went to work or to school. It is the most successful conservative social change in more than eighty years.
Although the number of irredeemably failed government policies is too great to count here, we can consider just two major ones. First, current energy regulatory policy cripples the development of American energy and keeps us dangerously dependent on foreign energy sources. Second, our fiscal policies rely on over-spending and then financing our deficit by selling bonds to regimes like China, which now holds nearly $800 billion of our national debt.
You don’t reform policies that fail that spectacularly. You replace them.
THE CREAKING BUREAUCRATIC STRUCTURE
There is a structural gap between the emerging information-age world of global markets and our current red-tape-ridden, rule-bound, bureaucratic structures of government.
The emerging world is one of an explosion of science and technology (with 4-7 times more new scientific knowledge in the next twenty-five years than in the last twenty-five) and a potentially huge increase in productivity driven by new information technology capabilities, behavioral economics, and management systems.
Now, consider the origins of our bureaucracies today, as first noted back in 1984 by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in The Third Wave:
• The public education bureaucracy is a holdover from a model first developed in the 1840s.
• The civil service model used in state and federal government, with its rigidity and job protections even for the incompetent, first arose in the 1880s.
• The concept of government by professional bureaucracies doing “the right thing” goes back to the Progressive movement of 1896-1916.
• Washington’s large, paper-based bureaucracies were developed during the Great Depression and World War II (1933-1946).
• The system of Medicare and Medicaid as bureaucracies within the greater healthcare bureaucracy was developed in 1965.
• Washington-based environmental bureaucrats wielding power over private property through arbitrary decisions, punishments, red tape, and litigation date back to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.1
Imagine you were a private company using technology and practices from 1849 or 1880 or even 1970 to compete with China and India. How long would you survive?
Overall, our government bureaucracy has become a giant bubble. Like the bubbles we saw with information technology stocks, housing, and financial derivatives, government has become overvalued compared to its actual return on investm
ent. It’s subject to graft, it favors insiders, and it has become overleveraged to the tune of $11 trillion.
The sheer obsolescence of the culture, rules, and technology of the bulk of modern government means it has to be replaced—not reformed—if we want to remain competitive globally in the twenty-first century.
HOW THE LEFT WILL TRY TO DEFEAT REPLACEMENT: “REALISM”
The Left will bitterly oppose efforts to replace the failed policies and bureaucracies of government because these are all components in the machine the Left have created to stay in power.
One tactic they will use to outlast any replacement effort is a simple, seemingly commonsense demand for “realism.” Whenever conservative candidates or elected officials propose sweeping changes, the media denounce them for being “unrealistic” or even “intellectually dishonest.”
However, faced with the corruption and across-the-board failure of state and federal bureaucracies, the American people do not want “realism,” as long as realism means being too cowardly to challenge the status quo.
When conservatives fall for the trap of being “realistic,” they turn timid. This, in turn, dissipates the energy from the American people that generates voter turnout. And that turnout is what we need to replace the current generation of machine politicians and their outdated bureaucracies.
To Save America: Abolishing Obama's Socialist State and Restoring Our Unique American Way Page 14
