The left parlayed its self-proclaimed moral superiority to institute a staggering panoply of government-funded social programs that would transform America forever. President Johnson assumed office upon President Kennedy’s assassination and inaugurated a progressive domestic agenda so ambitious that it shocked and alienated the Kennedy family.29 If anyone doubts the Democrats’ socialist roots, he can go back a few decades earlier and examine FDR’s New Deal, not to mention the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, whom some call the “Godfather of Liberalism.”30 Though liberal revisionists maintain that Roosevelt’s energetic statism was part of a strategy to save capitalism from the ravages of the Great Depression, his policies exacerbated and prolonged the Depression rather than ameliorating it.31
But there is not a hint of ambiguity about the socialistic nature of LBJ’s Great Society agenda, even down to its title, which Johnson borrowed from a 1914 socialist screed by British political scientist Graham Wallas.32 Unlike FDR, Johnson didn’t present his grandiose agenda ostensibly to lift America out of a depression but as an unmasked plan of social reengineering. In his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, Johnson announced his utopian goal. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson pronounced.33
Like all socialistic programs, the War on Poverty assumed that Washington elitists have more wisdom and compassion than the people and so could eliminate poverty and racial discrimination, remake cities, and repair our public education system. The sweeping magnitude of LBJ’s program was revolutionary, from his education legislation providing aid and benefits for low-income students; to instituting Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor, respectively; to dramatically relaxing immigration laws; to the Voting Rights Act. There were beneficial aspects to some of these laws, undoubtedly, but the Constitution vests state governments with authority over most of them and they were structured to be unsustainable in the long run. As many have argued, this was the defining moment when the Democratic Party permanently established itself as the party of big government and most major institutions in the United States came within the federal government’s fiscal and regulatory control.34 The program also delivered a devastating blow to the constitutional doctrine of federalism, as the federal government swallowed much of the existing power of state and local governments by making them dependent on federal aid and increasingly encumbered by federal regulations.
To capitalize on this moment, Steele observes, the left had to ensure that America’s past wrongs were seen as ongoing menaces that threatened the nation’s moral legitimacy. Believing their power would increase commensurate with the gravity of the menaces, the left, over time, cleverly developed a list of additional “isms” and “phobias” that had to be defeated, and they positioned themselves to lead the charge against them.
The left also used these bogeymen to legitimize their policy agenda, which they argued, to great success, was directly connected to their moral authority to fight these menaces. As leftists were moral crusaders against America’s ills, they deserved to be trusted to remedy them. The left’s political agenda thereby acquired greater moral gravity—the policy prescriptions leftists advocated were billed as morally superior to conservatives’ proposals, which were deemed to be aligned with the various menaces. So LBJ’s Great Society programs were seen as moral necessities, and their supporters—Democrats and the left—were the great saviors. Those opposing them were immoral, uncompassionate, and, of course, racist.
Steele argues that the left’s dependence on invoking these menaces became their “Achilles’ heel” because the expansion of women’s and minorities’ rights made these issues less urgent and diminished the left’s moral claim to power. As civil rights laws were enacted and enforced and racism gradually subsided, the left, whose raison d’etre was crusading against discrimination, faced the crisis of their looming obsolescence, which is the source of their angst and hatefulness. Steele is correct that the left is steeped in hate, which is ironic, considering they always accuse conservatives of spreading hate. It’s simple projection.
Unfortunately, negative attitudes are contagious. It is the nature of activists to proselytize. Unlike Christian evangelists who spread the Good News, leftists seek to sow discontent among the groups they depict as aggrieved. This was particularly evident with President Obama.
One would think his election to the presidency would have reassured Americans that racism had greatly diminished in the United States. Instead of treating it in that spirit, though, Obama used his bully pulpit to spread racial division and distrust. He constantly racialized events and fomented ill will among minorities toward cops, from his outburst that the Cambridge police acted stupidly when arresting Harvard professor Henry Gates to his incendiary statements on Trayvon Martin. He demeaned conservatives as bitter clingers who recoil from people who don’t look like them.
Taking Obama’s cue, the liberal media further fanned the flames of racial disharmony. According to a Rasmussen poll released on July 19, 2016 (around the midpoint of Obama’s second term), race relations had reached an all-time low. Sixty percent of the respondents said race relations had deteriorated under Obama and only 9 percent said they had improved.35 By contrast—and certainly contrary to leftist propaganda—a recent study by Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington, two University of Pennsylvania sociologists, shows a decrease in racism under President Trump. “Anti-black prejudice… declined by a statistically-insignificant degree between 2012 and 2016.… But then after 2016 it took a sharp dive that was statistically significant. Moreover, contrary to their expectations, the fall was as evident among Republican voters as it was among Democrats.”36
DEMOCRAT DENIAL
The left, as noted, developed a comprehensive slate of policies for minorities, the disadvantaged, the poor, women, and children. Their overarching, self-professed righteousness facilitated their gross expansion of government—higher taxes, explosive regulations, income redistribution schemes, exorbitant entitlement programs, government healthcare, and expansive welfare programs—as their policies were assumed to be driven by compassion.
Conservative policies have been far more effective in improving the lives of all people, including disadvantaged groups, than has socialism, which tends to impoverish and enslave the people it ostensibly means to help. Smaller and less intrusive government means more liberty and greater prosperity across the board—a rising tide lifts all boats. The left’s domestic policy agenda is fiscally unsustainable and has produced results opposite of those they promised.
After fifty years of experimentation, progressives’ domestic policies—welfare, public housing, forced school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, the Medicare and Medicaid debt bombs, Obamacare, public education, green energy, economic stimulus programs, and environmental boondoggles—have consistently failed. They are angry not only because of their declining relevance on race but also because their policies haven’t improved American lives.
But they are in denial about their policy failures. They embrace their ideology with dogmatic fervor, more as a matter of faith than evidence. They reject the inconvenient fact that Jimmy Carter’s misery index and pessimistic projections of permanent economic malaise were obliterated by Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and that Donald Trump’s explosive economy has dwarfed Obama’s anemic one, shattering Obama’s Carter-like predictions of economic mediocrity. The Democrats’ powers of rationalization have grown in proportion to the failure of their policies, so they delude themselves into believing that Trump’s robust economy is merely an extension of the Obama “recovery” while ignoring the indisputable fact that Trump’s policies have markedly improved the plight of minorities and women. A Politico headline summed up the left’s self-deception: “Trump Inherits Obama Boom.”37
This disconnect has frustrated, confused, and outraged leftists—and their outrage is directed not at themselves for clinging to false promises, but at conser
vatives. They can’t accept that people they deem morally inferior have superior solutions for society’s problems. Even if conservatives’ free-market policies are more effective, why should they get credit when they don’t care about people? It would be like praising a robot—except praising conservatives would be worse because human beings, unlike robots, are capable of caring. Besides, if conservative policies work it’s only because people are evil. If people weren’t so selfish, competitive, and greedy, they’d be content with the government handing them an equal share of society’s wealth instead of striving for more. No amount of evidence will disabuse progressives of their sense of moral superiority. It’s as if leftists believe in the biblical notion of the Fall, but that it only applies to conservatives.
FEARLESS LIBERALS AND PARANOID CONSERVATIVES
Liberals have bigger hearts, and they’ve enlisted pop psychology to prove it. Consider, for example, evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber’s “Why Liberal Hearts Bleed and Conservatives Don’t.” Citing an allegedly scientific study, Barber concludes that “conservatives see the world as a more threatening place because their brains predispose them to being fearful.” Conservatives’ “brain biology,” he argues, inclines them to hate complexity and compromise. “That would help to explain why politics can be so polarized, particularly in a rather conservative era like the present,” he wrote in 2012.38 (I suppose this means, from the leftist perspective, we are born conservative or liberal but not necessarily male or female.)
The biological predisposition to fear “illuminates the conservative take on specific political issues in fairly obvious ways,” argues Barber. They are more religious “because religious rituals foster feelings of safety in a dangerous world.” Liberals, you see, are less religious because they see the world as less threatening and they rely more on science and education to solve problems. Conservatives “tend to be more hostile to immigrants, foreigners, and racial or ethnic minorities and to view them as more of a threat.” Liberals, of course, are more welcoming. “Conservatives are pro-family because being surrounded by close relatives is the best defense against threats that surround them,” while “[l]iberals are less interested in family ties as a protective bubble.”39
Despite liberals’ supposedly superior brain power, they do not—if Barber is representative of their thinking—have the faintest clue as to what makes conservatives tick. If conservatives view the world as a more “threatening place,” it’s because we are more realistic. Is it necessary to have a Judeo-Christian worldview to recognize that we live in a woefully imperfect world? That evil people exist who want to harm us? That the human species, despite our advances in science and technology, is not advancing morally?
Conservatives aren’t drawn to Christianity because its rituals are comforting. That theory is frightfully similar to Karl Marx’s mantra that religion is the opiate of the masses. Is that a coincidence? People become Christians not to shelter themselves from the world or to inoculate themselves with false feelings of security but because they understand they aren’t capable of saving themselves. They understand that man is not the measure of all things, so they trust in Jesus Christ to redeem them from their sins. The feelings of security that flow from their faith are based on the promise of eternal life. But Christianity does not assure the faithful that they’ll be spared from earthly problems; in fact, it guarantees them they will not. Happily, however, those struggles often facilitate their spiritual growth.
Nor are conservatives hostile to science, but we oppose its politicization and reject the notion that science can answer all of man’s questions or resolve all his problems. We understand that science must be kept within its own sphere and cannot address philosophical or spiritual issues, which are outside its domain.
Conservatives don’t view minorities as a threat and are not unwelcoming to immigrants but adamantly oppose illegal immigration. Conservatives don’t oppose progressive programs ostensibly aimed at helping the poor and minorities because we are uncompassionate. Rather, we know these programs are harmful to people’s welfare and dignity and destructive to society overall. It is more reasonable to conclude that leftists are indifferent to minorities because their programs inevitably harm them. At what point is it fair to judge the left on the results of their policies rather than their professed good intentions?
“BIPARTISAN COMPROMISES LEAD TO EXPANDED GOVERNMENT”
It’s time to jettison the myth that liberals are more conciliatory than conservatives. Modern American history shows that political compromise through the decades has invariably advanced leftist ideas, putting America on a steady march toward socialism. But liberals have masterfully sold themselves as being amenable to compromise, while it’s the hard-hearted Republicans who supposedly refuse to negotiate. The liberal media have reinforced this canard for years. For example, they have successfully blamed Republicans for all government shutdowns. Some believe this is because the GOP is seen as anti-government and the Democratic Party as pro-government. In reality, the media present Republicans as harsh, extremist, and uncompromising, even though Republicans have not grown more conservative since the Reagan years, while Democrats have moved radically left. Republicans may sometimes appear entrenched, but it’s because we have had to ratchet up our resistance in proportion to the left’s increasing extremism.
Empirical evidence belies the left’s claim that Republicans are less willing to compromise. Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann tested the conventional wisdom that congressional conservatives are the primary culprits in Washington’s partisan dysfunction. He examined whether congressional overseers Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann were correct in 2014 in blaming Republicans for running “the worst Congress ever.” After Grossman “combed through hundreds of history books covering American public policy since 1945,” he concluded that most policies under debate are liberal, and Republican leaders sacrifice conservative principles when they compromise. “Of the 509 most significant domestic policies passed by Congress,” Grossman explained, “only one in five were conservative, in that they contracted the scope of government funding, regulation or responsibility. More than 60 percent were liberal: They clearly expanded government.… The view that normal legislating and bipartisan compromises lead to expanded government is no tea party illusion; it is an accurate reading of the past 70 years.”40
Grossman found that just 10 percent of the major executive orders and agency rules were conservative.41 Even if you count those instances of government expansion that advance conservative goals, it makes little difference, says Grossman, because substantial policy changes of this kind rarely occur. When Republicans have succeeded in shrinking a government program it’s almost always in exchange for a liberal government expansion elsewhere.
It’s natural that conservatives are seen as obstructive because lawmakers derive their worth from taking action, which means more domestic spending, regulation, and increased government control. Not only does the nature of the legislative branch militate toward liberalism, says Grossman, but progressive laws “are self-reinforcing because they create beneficiaries who act as constituencies for their continuation and expansion.”42 Congress creates dependency groups who never ask them to roll back their programs but only to expand them. The legislative process generates its own expansion inertia.
Another force for expanding government is the constant pressure on politicians of both parties to deliver for their respective constituents. They have to be seen as doing something. Macro-level conservative pressure usually favors restricting the size, scope, and role of government—cutting taxes, slashing regulations, and the like. But micro-level pressure, even from red states and communities, is often directed at government expansion, as constituents lobby their congressmen to “bring home the bacon.” Conservative congressmen also feel obligated to prove they care about people as much as liberals do by enacting legislation that expands government. Tax cuts are one exceptional example of Republican legislation that red
uces the government’s scope, but there are far more examples of Republicans expanding government, from wage and price controls under Nixon, to President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and his Medicare Part D entitlement. Even President Reagan, according to Grossman, signed more government expansion legislation than government contraction legislation. It’s the nature of the beast.
Grossman’s takeaway is ominous: “The arc of the policy universe is long, but it bends toward liberalism. Conservatives can slow the growth of government but an enduring shift in policy direction would be unprecedented. History shows that a do-nothing Congress is a conservative’s best-case scenario.”43 Sadly, a do-nothing Congress doesn’t play well with voters.
SUITING UP FOR THE CULTURE WAR
Whether we like it or not, the left is waging a fierce culture war against our traditional values. Its worldview rejects the biblical teaching that man is fallen despite being created in God’s image. Most leftists believe that Christianity hindered man’s enlightenment for centuries and that the advancement of science and reason alone, particularly in the Enlightenment era, placed man on an inexorable path toward progress and moral perfection. They conveniently ignore the enormous blessings to humanity derived from Christianity as well as the deaths of a hundred million people in the twentieth century alone at the hands of godless Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes. They are trapped in a spiritual void they seek to fill through myriad utopian and idolatrous pursuits, from socialism, to the environment, to social causes. Conservatives oppose the leftists’ utopian dreams, which solidifies the left’s perception that conservatives are immoral, uncaring, and on the wrong side of history. They view conservatives as heretics who reject the left’s secularist worldview and oppose scientific, moral, and quasi-spiritual “progress.” Metaphorically, at least, they want to burn us at the stake.
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 3
