I trust what the Congressmen say far more than what you say, cyclops. I do not consider your posts here credible. I do not believe at all that they would hold up appointments without good reasons. You make a serious allegation, which you have just pulled out of your partisan you know what.
By the way, was Van Jones an example of an appointment they opposed because they could?
Cycloptichorn wrote:Sessions blocked 20 nominees yesterday because he feels that Obama's nominees are moving 'too quickly.' Cycloptichorn
Excellent reasoning by Sessions, good for him.
One thing we do not want is Obama pushing through his appointments without properly examining their merits. Much of the time, the appointments are really bad ones. Lets see, how many communists or Marxists has Obama tried to appoint by now?
http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=statist&x=26&y=8
Main Entry: 1stat·ist
Pronunciation Guide
Pronunciation: -d.st, -t-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: 1state + -ist
1 archaic : one versed in state affairs : POLITICIAN <hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to write fair -- Shakespeare>
2 [translation of French étatiste] : an advocate of statism <our planners and statists -- Raymond Moley>
http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=statism&x=25&y=8
Main Entry: stat·ism
Pronunciation Guide
Variant(s): or state·ism \std.izm, -ti-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: 1state + -ism; translation of French étatisme
: concentration of all economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government <abandoned her former reliance on statism in favor of private enterprise -- World> -- compare GOVERNMENTALISM 1
http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=conservative&x=28&y=7
Main Entry: 1con·serv·a·tive
Pronunciation Guide
Pronunciation: knsrvd.]iv, -sv-, -siv, -vt]iv also ]v
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French & Late Latin; Middle French conservatif, from Late Latin conservativus, from Latin conservatus (past part of conservare to conserve) + -ivus -ive -- more at CONSERVE
1 : having the power or tendency to preserve in a safe and entire state : PRESERVATIVE <the conservative powers of the Egyptian climate have given us priceless relics in near-perfect condition> <conservative of all good things>; specifically : designed to preserve parts or restore function <conservative surgery> -- compare RADICAL
2 a : of or relating to a political party, point of view, or philosophy that advocates preservation of the established order and views proposals for change critically and usually with distrust <conservative elements opposed to ... further steps toward socialization or nationalization -- Collier's Year Book> b : of, relating to, or constituting a political party professing the principles of conservatism : as (1) usually capitalized : of or constituting one of the two major parties in the United Kingdom evolving from the 18th century Tories and in modern times associated with policies advocating support of established institutions, a close relationship with the Commonwealth and Empire, and a positive although limited role by the government in social and economic affairs <the parliamentary Conservative party is preeminently recruited from the upper and upper-middle classes -- J.F.S.Ross> <a handsome Conservative majority ... emerged from the general election -- J.A.Hawgood> -- compare LABOR, LIBERAL, TORY, UNIONIST, WHIG (2) usually capitalized : Progressive Conservative
3 a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions : opposed to radical or basic changes : exhibiting minimal change : TRADITIONAL <conservative policies> <a conservative administration> <a conservative genus> b : not in excess <conservative action> : CAUTIOUS <a conservative point of view> <a conservative utterance> : MODERATE <a conservative estimate of 200> : unwilling to overreach : involving little or fearful of risk <a conservative banker> <conservative investments> c : tending to avoid dissonance, showiness, or effects that would attract undue or immediate attention : cleaving to traditional norms of taste, elegance, or manners <a conservative suit> <a rich but conservative architectural style>
4 : of or relating to Conservative Judaism
synonyms REACTIONARY, DIE-HARD, TORY: conservative suggests desire to retain and maintain existing institutions, procedures, and ways and to resist and suspect proposals for change <although he was naturally conservative and did not disturb the predominance of Latin and Greek, he somewhat modified the curriculum -- C.M.Fuess> REACTIONARY applies to wishes to return to an older outworn order or to influences making for such a return; unlike CONSERVATIVE, it is almost always derogatory <both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation were reactionary; though they brought the Middle Ages to an end, they themselves were medieval in spirit and method -- W.R.Inge> DIE-HARD implies a stubborn, truculent retention of older procedures and resistance to new <some die-hard individual may insist on driving a horse and buggy after all the rest of his society have automobiles -- Ralph Linton> <while the Progressive Conservative platform reflected the party's die-hard conservatism on most issues, it came out, in striking contrast to previous policies, for the principle of expanding international trade -- Collier's Year Book> TORY may suggest a sometimes reactionary allegiance to long-established principles and social customs <to a slow-moving and Tory society they were radical changes shocking to men's minds -- C.W.de Kiewiet>
I gave you a link where they clearly outlined what went on. Did you even read it?
Quote:By the way, was Van Jones an example of an appointment they opposed because they could?
No - he was not required to be confirmed by the Senate. These are the little details that make you look like you don't know what you are talking about, Okie.
Cycloptichorn
You're totally blown on this issue, you have been shown to be factually wrong, and you do what you do every time - retreat into yelling 'communist! Marxist!' You are a one-trick pony, Okie.
Cycloptichorn
http://newstrust.net/stories/2527198/toolbar?ref=sp
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
#3 of 6
Dependence Economics
By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.
Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.
By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.
Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).
The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute "the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what "the system" offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost ofcare. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run "guaranteed retirement accounts." If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?
Who Depends on Whom?
In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.
Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison's Federalist #10, "refine and enlarge the public's view," to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain's electoral system -- like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote -- had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson's time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.
In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments -- not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.
To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s -- elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.
Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.
Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.
The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.
Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal -- administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.
Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.
By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.
As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
Well, I can see this isn't going to be easy. It is mind bending, and probably impossible to have much agreement. Since I started this thread, I presume I can try to define the issues, then what is left and right on those issues, and then take the arrows and try to dodge the. I realize the terms, left and right, vary in meaning with time and place, and depending on which historical or political "expert" you listen to. I further realize what I am up against here when
I read Setanta:
"From the perspective of the rest of the world, although there is a leftist fringe in the United States, there is no left in politics. From that perspective, there are only relative statements about how far to the right an American politician might be. I agree wholeheartedly.
and:
"One of the several points which ought to be obvious from my post is that to say politics in the United States are moving to the left is to say that they are moving toward the center. "
and from Walter Hinteler:
"Although the title doesn't say it, I suppose, it's just about the USAmerican situation.
I agree with what Set said above, namely that politics in the USA is movening towards the center - seen from outsite and compared to the tiny part of the world, which isn't USA. "
and from blatham:
"Analysis of government policy (established against a "left/right" scale) by Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal and Nolan McCarty demonstrate a significant shift rightward over the last half century such that Eisenhower looks (in the words of one economist) "a raving socialist" when compared to Clinton. "
Before starting this, I don't think it is logical to argue this from a world perspective. After all, we have our own Constitution and we are a nation of our own traditions and laws, and unless we scrap those, I think those should provide the basic framework for comparison, instead of bringing in how the Soviets or the Swedes or Germans might think for example as part of the equation. And another red flag to me is that a historian can analyze Eisenhower as a raving socialist. Thats a bit troubling, because I just recently read an article in an old Saturday Evening Post, written by Ike himself, the title of which was "Why I am a Republican." After I read his carefully explained philosophy, I felt he was my guy for sure, a conservative on pretty much every point as myself.
I now understand all you one worlders. The U.S. is an extreme Right country, all of us, even liberals are barely moving to the center. Am I understanding you all correctly? I understand you people now. You've outed yourselves. Apparently, you must all be a bunch of socialists or even further left than that? I am supposed to apologize for believeing in American tradition and ideals? I am a dinosaur?
Setanta, I don't think I've smeared anybody. I simply said if you like it better in those countries, go there. I'm sure they love their countries and have every reason to love it. I would to if I lived there. My point is don't try to install their laws here, their culture here. *We have a country here with our own laws, our own constitution that has served us well. Sigh! I knew this would happen. I've got work to do. I'll be back later. Peace. All you people seem reasonable. I guess I asked for it by starting this thread.
One parting shot, Setanta and Walter Hinteler, is that a little like waiting for the Yankees to quit losing the World Series? Some people don't like it if you are too successful.
I do need to go back to work. But I take it that nobody can even agree on the substantive issues to discuss? I apologize for even making the attempt to pin down some issues that could begin to even define the subject. If we can't agree on the subject, I'd say its maybe over. I'll check in later.
This thread is entitled: Defining issues of today's politics / Left vs Right.
The participants here immediately and cogently addressed definitions of right and left. You react by picking up all your marbles, scowling and growling and saying you are going home. Nice debate . . .
Bye . . . don't hurry back . . .
I think it's totally okay, if you just want to discuss what you like to be discussed.
But you should have said, excluded other opinions than yours etc in that case.
Thanks anyway.
One of the frustrations on a forum like this is the difficulty of getting people to honestly say what they believe. I think this is another example of that. I tire of moving targets to be honest.
I think, everybody here says what she/he honestly thinks.
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America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
#4 of 6
Disaggregating and Dispiriting
The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.
While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."
At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.
While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.
By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking -- to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards." Each day, the ruling class produces new "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.
Meddling and Apologies
America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."
Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.
Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.
Similarly, Obama "apologized" to Europeans because some Americans -- not him and his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men..."
In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.
Others say the current recession started when Bush in his last term failed to fix Fan & Fred, and increased spending.
