I read this outstanding and insightful piece this morning and I can't stop thinking about it so I decided to post it. It is written by Larkin Rose who contributes at Freedomsphoenix.com:
The ongoing discussion of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords makes an outstanding example of the utter insanity and profound hypocrisy which the belief in "government" creates. Specifically, nearly all the related discussions about violence have turned reality upside-down, backwards, and inside out. Leftists are having conniption fits about the political ads by Sarah Palin, showing Giffords in "crosshairs," screaming that that counts as advocating violence. There are several ways in which this complaint is completely batty.
1) Leftist constantly advocate violence. "Taxation," as one example, is the forced confiscation of wealth backed by the threat of violence. Those who timidly cooperate with the mere threat never see the violence in their face, but take it from someone who has had his home forcibly invaded by armed IRS agents: "taxation" is backed by men with guns, who are quite willing to use violence to get their way. When all those leftists who support the very system of "taxation" that resulted not only in an armed invasion of my home, but in me being caged for a year, whine about a stupid political ad, the level of hypocrisy makes me want to vomit.
2) Right-wing statists, like Sarah Palin, also constantly advocate violence, in the form of various "laws" and authoritarian actions. Gabrielle Giffords herself was part of the federal war-mongering committee, which constantly advocates a double-dose of violence: violence used to force all Americans, including pacifists, to fund overt violence overseas. Bizarrely, instead of being criticized for that--instead of being taken to task for advocating aggression against hundreds of millions of Americans and the murder of lots of foreigners--Sarah Palin is being attacked for a stupid campaign ad. Holy smokes, people! Could your priorities and perspectives possibly be any more screwed up?!
3) There is a moral difference between aggressive force--initiating violence against someone who hasn't threatened or harmed anyone--and using defensive force. The vast majority of "government" violence, advocated by the "left" and the "right," is unjustified, immoral aggressive force. But again, statists from both sides, being believers in the cult of "government," don't think it counts as violence, because in their eyes, it's not being committed by mere people, but by the mystical, magical, superhuman entity known as "government." And most people imagine that it has the right to do things which mere mortals do not.
Defensive force, even deadly force if necessary, is both moral and justified. And whether it's "legal" or not makes no difference. What this means is that, when the thugs wearing the label of "government" commit aggression, resisting them by any means necessary is absolutely justified. As a practical matter, I would almost always advise against it, because resistors will almost always be caged, and often killed, for daring to resist "legal" aggression. But whether it's a good idea in practical terms (which it usually isn't), and whether it's moral (which it is), are different issues.
The end result is that I'm watching the insane national argument over the Giffords shootings, as one who believes that defensive force--even if "illegal" and even if used against "law enforcers"--is justified. Meanwhile, both groups of people who are constantly advocating the use of aggressive violence are arguing over something that was not an example of advocating violence (political rhetoric and ads). It's just too weird to take.
Gabrielle Giffords herself was directly involved in exerting aggressive violence, overseas and here, against non-violent people, via war-mongering, "taxation," forcibly interfering with the medical industry, and so on. She was not an innocent. She was an advocate of widespread, perpetual, forcible aggression. But being a devout statist, I'm guessing that she truly believed that the violence she was helping to commit didn't count as violence, because it was called "law," and done in the name of "authority." That's a perfect example of what The Most Dangerous Superstition leads to: basically good people do evil things, and don't even notice.
So one set of people who constantly advocate violence (Democrats) are complaining about another set of people who constantly advocate violence (Republicans), based on something that is not the advocacy of violence (the political ads). It's like one gang of thieves criticizing another gang of thieves for committing a crime they didn't actually commit. How weird can it get? Statists, "left" and "right," advocate constant, wide-spread violence against millions of people, but they genuinely imagine, having been indoctrinated into state-worship, that it doesn't count as violence because it is being done by the deity called "government," which they imagine to be exempt from human morality.
As if that wasn't looney enough, there has also been the predictable clamor of people who say that the Gifford shooting proves that we need more "gun control." The belief in "authority" allows otherwise rational people to openly declare that they abhor violence, while saying they want guns "outlawed." They fail to notice the glaring contradiction therein.
Every "law" ("gun control" or otherwise) is not a suggestion, or a request, but a threat of violence, which will be enforced by men with guns. Putting it in question form makes "gun control" advocates squirm: If I keep a firearm even when it's "illegal" to do so (and I would), so that I can protect my family from aggressors, what do you "gun control" proponents advocate be done to me if I get caught? Do you advocate that someone give me a stern talking to? Do you advocate that people ask me nicely to disarm myself? Or do you advocate that I be forcibly captured and put in a cage? And if I resist that--which I would--do you advocate that I be killed? If you don't mind, please don't advocate that I be murdered, while claiming that you abhor violence. And don't advocate someone shooting me, while saying you hate gun violence. Doing so is both immoral and insane.
"Gun control" is violence enforced with guns. In other words, so-called "gun control" is gun violence. Ask a Branch Davidian about this, if you can find one who the feds haven't murdered yet. Or ask Randy Weaver. Ask him how compassionate and peace-loving "gun control" is. If you don't know what I'm talking about, turn off your statist-controlled TV long enough to do an internet search, and see "gun control" in action.
To be blunt, the opinions of the average American regarding morality, violence and justice are warped and twisted to the point of being about as backward as they could possibly be. The good news is that this is not the result of individual stupidity or malice. It is the result of life-long indoctrination into the cult of "government." If you love humanity, and consider yourself peace-loving, I dare you to read "The Most Dangerous Superstition." You may find that your good intentions and noble virtues are being used against you, to the extreme detriment of humanity. You may find that all the pain and suffering that you see in the world, all the injustice you want to end, is feeding off of you. If that were the case, would you want to know? Or would you rather cling to whatever you already believe, regardless of the harm it may be doing to others? Again, I dare you to read the book. (Source)
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Andrew Thomas Asks: Do Liberals Crave A Master?
Umm, yes. But here is what Andrew Thomas had to say over at American Thinker this morning (You know the drill my comments in red):
Everybody's looking for something...
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Sweet dreams are made of these
Who am I to disagree? - Eurythmics
Contemporary liberals, having abandoned the belief in God-given inalienable rights, masochistically crave a worldly master. This master is a sadistic god-substitute who will provide the stern discipline needed to force economic equality and "fairness" by requiring painful sacrifices and bestowing government-created rights onto obedient and acquiescent groups of left-leaning masochists. (Flashback--yesterday's press-conference (although I'm not sure you could call it that since Pres. Obama didn't field any questions) where he tells us we will be required to "sacrifice".)
Of course, I am not referring to the sexual variety of masochism, but rather the recognized psychosis of moral masochism. Large segments of the population, and even entire nations can suffer from this illness as described in Daniel Rancour-Laferriere's book, "The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering". (Yes, black folks have begun to display framed pictures of the Obama's on the wall of their foyers. Just like the old folks used to display pictures of MLK, JFK and Jesus)
First, some re-definitions: In the same derogatory fashion liberals refer to contemporary Conservatives as "neocons", I will label this group as "neolibs" going forward. I feel this is appropriate, as the Liberal movement has taken a decidedly leftward leap and become more radicalized in their outward behavior in the last few years, and is therefore a new phenomenon.
In most conservative writing (Thomas Sowell, Ayn Rand, and more recently Mark Levin) the common theme is the sanctity of individual freedom and liberty. The conservative is an individualist and an independent thinker, as opposed to those who primarily identify themselves as members of a group. The term "conservative" is a misnomer for this philosophy, as it connotes a preservation of the status quo, or even a "regressive" yin to the "Progressive" yang. This is why I believe a more appropriate label for conservative philosophy is "individualist", and I will refer to it in this manner for the remainder of this article. (Somehow being an individualist and looking out for the concerns of yourself and your family has fallen out of vogue. It's more noble somehow to gleefully accept the Federal Government's extractions of your money in order to care for the needs of the collective.)
Next, a pop-psychology primer: individualists gravitate toward existential thinking, or a view of the world where individuals have complete freedom of choice and take full responsibility for the results of those choices. This mandates that choices must be made with a logical evaluation to determine the potential consequences. The impartial evaluation of phenomena to determine the truth is an offshoot of existentialism known as phenomenology. The phenomenologist is rational and emotionally detached from the subject of analysis, eliminating judgment and perception. Once the perceptions of reality are stripped away as much as possible, the phenomenologist then attempts to perform an insightful analysis of the object to determine what is real or "true". I believe that many individualists tend to be effective phenomenologists due to their ability to separate themselves from group-think and emotional judgment. Therefore, let's use the phenomenological process to analyze the "Neolib as masochist" theory. (Fancy that, a new word to describe conservative thought -- phenomenology. Henceforth I shall refer to myself as an phenomenologist.)
In our first analysis, we will impartially examine Neolib behavior. Objectively listen to Janeane Garofalo in the Youtube video linked to her name. In listening to neolibs such as Janeane speak, it is evident that they appear to be driven predominantly by emotion rather than logic. Just reviewing an alphabetical list of emotions, as extracted from a list in Wikipedia, lends itself to describing neolib behavior:
Anger,
Angst,
Anxiety,
Compassion,
Contempt,
Despair,
Disgust,
Empathy,
Envy,
Guilt,
Hatred,
Hope,
Hostility,
Hysteria,
Rage,
Shame,
Suffering,
Worry.
(Wow, I'm wondering if Mr. Thomas has been reading my blog comments and using UptownSteve, etal as the prototype for the Neolib)
Anyone who views the world through these emotions would naturally feel threatened when interpreting individualists' behavior. The neolib typically projects hatred, bigotry, selfishness, and greed onto the individualist when there is no physical evidence to support the interpretation. The strong passions exhibited by neolibs, coupled with delusions of persecution, foster these masochistic tendencies. (Delusions of persecution? Well, slavery wasn't an illusion but some are choosing to be "persecuted" by it in 2009 and taking the term "never forget" to a whole different dimension)
Now let's objectively review the initiatives in the neolib agenda: Environmentalism, global passivism, overpopulation, socialized healthcare, and promoting government intervention into all aspects of life. All of these priorities require individuals to sacrifice their lifestyles, their income, and/or their basic comforts. (I'm thinking that Obama supporters just don't see it that way....although I'm not sure how they rationalize it because the discourse never seems to advance beyond racism and the presumed "buck dancing" of the black conservative...ahem, I mean the black phenomenologist)
This past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted, "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory..." in order to sacrifice ourselves to the gods of global warming. As presidential candidate Obama said, "We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times..." He seems to indicate that he wants us to starve and freeze. (Well 72 degrees is hardly freezing but when it's 13 degrees outside I should be free to turn my thermostat to 82 degrees if I want to and as long as I'm paying the utility bill. It's very sad and rather astounding how many really smart people have bought into this global warming scam. I guess all it takes to convince the masses is a movie.)
Most of these initiatives involve the inflicting of pain and misery. Tom Daschle, in his book "Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis" says health-care reform "will not be pain free" and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of having them treated. In other words, you will suffer a slow agonizing death under government mandate. (I think it's fascinating that the black quasi-socialist fundamentalist progressive racism chasers aren't all over this. I guess they think that as long as we have a black POTUS that black senior citizens will get preferential treatment under ObamaCare)
As a final phenomenological exercise, impassively observe the level of neolib support for this agenda. It has not appeared to wane. In fact, neolib fervor continues to increase as the promised level of suffering increases. (I fully expect Neolibs to lie about the level of suffering they either have or will experience. Over the Memorial day weekend I was in conversation with Neolib, racism chasing friends who declared that the quality of life was better for them under the Clinton administration than the Bush administration. Because I was in mixed company I fought with every fiber of my being not to call them liars but they were lying through their teeth! These fools purchased cars,boats, furs, Rolexes and more as the pulled equity out of their homes and lived LARGE. Now that the loans have reset and the mortgage payments have increased they are blaming George Bush. I guess these well educated black professionals of PG county were duped. It's couldn't be they made bad decisions based on greed or a desire to keep up with the Joneses or in their cases the "Washington's" - lol)
According to Rancour-Laferriere, increasing Russian masochism coincided with the rise of the Soviet Union and Communism, although it was pervasive in the soul of Russia prior to that. The conclusion to this analysis is that as neolib moral masochism increases, so does the emotional need for an all-powerful master to govern them. As the governing master becomes more dominant and disciplinarian, the masochism is reinforced and the spiral continues.
(Well, I know nothing about Russians but I do know that as long as those who identify as Christians adopt the basic tenets of liberalism and fail to confront and openly admonish behaviors that lead to failure over behaviors that lead to success in the name of "tolerance" then we will continue to "need" government assistance. So that there is no confusion I'll just say what I mean -- as long as we accept our daughter dressing up like little (or big) harlots; and accept and sometimes encourage our sons to have several girlfriends; as long as we allow our sons to impregnate women without marrying them; or as long as we take our daughter's to get birth control pills instead of instilling in them as early as possible to abstain until marriage; as long as we allow our sons to turn a buck by any means necessary rather than study and excel in school in order to go to college or the military then all manner socially undesirable manifestations will ensue which ultimately lead to dependence of the government either in the form of welfare or the prison system.)
Is there a cure? Self-destructive behavior is very difficult to overcome. Many years ago in an Abnormal Psychology class, I studied the case of a group of young adults who would continually pound their heads against a wall until they became bloody pulps. Psychologists found that the only thing that would interrupt their behavior was a 9,000 volt shock from a cattle prod. (I hope my little space in the blogosphere can serve as a ideological cattle prod)
This is probably an impractical solution. Since 45% of the nation thinks we are going in the right direction, there are too many neolibs and too few cattle prods.
Everybody's looking for something...
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Sweet dreams are made of these
Who am I to disagree? - Eurythmics
Contemporary liberals, having abandoned the belief in God-given inalienable rights, masochistically crave a worldly master. This master is a sadistic god-substitute who will provide the stern discipline needed to force economic equality and "fairness" by requiring painful sacrifices and bestowing government-created rights onto obedient and acquiescent groups of left-leaning masochists. (Flashback--yesterday's press-conference (although I'm not sure you could call it that since Pres. Obama didn't field any questions) where he tells us we will be required to "sacrifice".)
Of course, I am not referring to the sexual variety of masochism, but rather the recognized psychosis of moral masochism. Large segments of the population, and even entire nations can suffer from this illness as described in Daniel Rancour-Laferriere's book, "The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering". (Yes, black folks have begun to display framed pictures of the Obama's on the wall of their foyers. Just like the old folks used to display pictures of MLK, JFK and Jesus)
First, some re-definitions: In the same derogatory fashion liberals refer to contemporary Conservatives as "neocons", I will label this group as "neolibs" going forward. I feel this is appropriate, as the Liberal movement has taken a decidedly leftward leap and become more radicalized in their outward behavior in the last few years, and is therefore a new phenomenon.
In most conservative writing (Thomas Sowell, Ayn Rand, and more recently Mark Levin) the common theme is the sanctity of individual freedom and liberty. The conservative is an individualist and an independent thinker, as opposed to those who primarily identify themselves as members of a group. The term "conservative" is a misnomer for this philosophy, as it connotes a preservation of the status quo, or even a "regressive" yin to the "Progressive" yang. This is why I believe a more appropriate label for conservative philosophy is "individualist", and I will refer to it in this manner for the remainder of this article. (Somehow being an individualist and looking out for the concerns of yourself and your family has fallen out of vogue. It's more noble somehow to gleefully accept the Federal Government's extractions of your money in order to care for the needs of the collective.)
Next, a pop-psychology primer: individualists gravitate toward existential thinking, or a view of the world where individuals have complete freedom of choice and take full responsibility for the results of those choices. This mandates that choices must be made with a logical evaluation to determine the potential consequences. The impartial evaluation of phenomena to determine the truth is an offshoot of existentialism known as phenomenology. The phenomenologist is rational and emotionally detached from the subject of analysis, eliminating judgment and perception. Once the perceptions of reality are stripped away as much as possible, the phenomenologist then attempts to perform an insightful analysis of the object to determine what is real or "true". I believe that many individualists tend to be effective phenomenologists due to their ability to separate themselves from group-think and emotional judgment. Therefore, let's use the phenomenological process to analyze the "Neolib as masochist" theory. (Fancy that, a new word to describe conservative thought -- phenomenology. Henceforth I shall refer to myself as an phenomenologist.)
In our first analysis, we will impartially examine Neolib behavior. Objectively listen to Janeane Garofalo in the Youtube video linked to her name. In listening to neolibs such as Janeane speak, it is evident that they appear to be driven predominantly by emotion rather than logic. Just reviewing an alphabetical list of emotions, as extracted from a list in Wikipedia, lends itself to describing neolib behavior:
Anger,
Angst,
Anxiety,
Compassion,
Contempt,
Despair,
Disgust,
Empathy,
Envy,
Guilt,
Hatred,
Hope,
Hostility,
Hysteria,
Rage,
Shame,
Suffering,
Worry.
(Wow, I'm wondering if Mr. Thomas has been reading my blog comments and using UptownSteve, etal as the prototype for the Neolib)
Anyone who views the world through these emotions would naturally feel threatened when interpreting individualists' behavior. The neolib typically projects hatred, bigotry, selfishness, and greed onto the individualist when there is no physical evidence to support the interpretation. The strong passions exhibited by neolibs, coupled with delusions of persecution, foster these masochistic tendencies. (Delusions of persecution? Well, slavery wasn't an illusion but some are choosing to be "persecuted" by it in 2009 and taking the term "never forget" to a whole different dimension)
Now let's objectively review the initiatives in the neolib agenda: Environmentalism, global passivism, overpopulation, socialized healthcare, and promoting government intervention into all aspects of life. All of these priorities require individuals to sacrifice their lifestyles, their income, and/or their basic comforts. (I'm thinking that Obama supporters just don't see it that way....although I'm not sure how they rationalize it because the discourse never seems to advance beyond racism and the presumed "buck dancing" of the black conservative...ahem, I mean the black phenomenologist)
This past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted, "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory..." in order to sacrifice ourselves to the gods of global warming. As presidential candidate Obama said, "We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times..." He seems to indicate that he wants us to starve and freeze. (Well 72 degrees is hardly freezing but when it's 13 degrees outside I should be free to turn my thermostat to 82 degrees if I want to and as long as I'm paying the utility bill. It's very sad and rather astounding how many really smart people have bought into this global warming scam. I guess all it takes to convince the masses is a movie.)
Most of these initiatives involve the inflicting of pain and misery. Tom Daschle, in his book "Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis" says health-care reform "will not be pain free" and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of having them treated. In other words, you will suffer a slow agonizing death under government mandate. (I think it's fascinating that the black quasi-socialist fundamentalist progressive racism chasers aren't all over this. I guess they think that as long as we have a black POTUS that black senior citizens will get preferential treatment under ObamaCare)
As a final phenomenological exercise, impassively observe the level of neolib support for this agenda. It has not appeared to wane. In fact, neolib fervor continues to increase as the promised level of suffering increases. (I fully expect Neolibs to lie about the level of suffering they either have or will experience. Over the Memorial day weekend I was in conversation with Neolib, racism chasing friends who declared that the quality of life was better for them under the Clinton administration than the Bush administration. Because I was in mixed company I fought with every fiber of my being not to call them liars but they were lying through their teeth! These fools purchased cars,boats, furs, Rolexes and more as the pulled equity out of their homes and lived LARGE. Now that the loans have reset and the mortgage payments have increased they are blaming George Bush. I guess these well educated black professionals of PG county were duped. It's couldn't be they made bad decisions based on greed or a desire to keep up with the Joneses or in their cases the "Washington's" - lol)
According to Rancour-Laferriere, increasing Russian masochism coincided with the rise of the Soviet Union and Communism, although it was pervasive in the soul of Russia prior to that. The conclusion to this analysis is that as neolib moral masochism increases, so does the emotional need for an all-powerful master to govern them. As the governing master becomes more dominant and disciplinarian, the masochism is reinforced and the spiral continues.
(Well, I know nothing about Russians but I do know that as long as those who identify as Christians adopt the basic tenets of liberalism and fail to confront and openly admonish behaviors that lead to failure over behaviors that lead to success in the name of "tolerance" then we will continue to "need" government assistance. So that there is no confusion I'll just say what I mean -- as long as we accept our daughter dressing up like little (or big) harlots; and accept and sometimes encourage our sons to have several girlfriends; as long as we allow our sons to impregnate women without marrying them; or as long as we take our daughter's to get birth control pills instead of instilling in them as early as possible to abstain until marriage; as long as we allow our sons to turn a buck by any means necessary rather than study and excel in school in order to go to college or the military then all manner socially undesirable manifestations will ensue which ultimately lead to dependence of the government either in the form of welfare or the prison system.)
Is there a cure? Self-destructive behavior is very difficult to overcome. Many years ago in an Abnormal Psychology class, I studied the case of a group of young adults who would continually pound their heads against a wall until they became bloody pulps. Psychologists found that the only thing that would interrupt their behavior was a 9,000 volt shock from a cattle prod. (I hope my little space in the blogosphere can serve as a ideological cattle prod)
This is probably an impractical solution. Since 45% of the nation thinks we are going in the right direction, there are too many neolibs and too few cattle prods.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Mark Levin: Obama's Destructive Vision
In an interview with Terry Jeffrey's CNSNews.com, Mark Levin discussed why he believes President Obama’s vision of “change” is destructive and contrary to America’s founding principles and why conservatives must reacquaint themselves with those principles and recommit themselves to the cause of individual liberty. The video is about 27 minutes long. I posted the transcript below which I couldn't abridge because it was just too compelling.
Here is the transcript (emphasis added):
Jeffrey: “For Edmund Burke, change as reform was intended to preserve and improve the basic institutions of the state. Change as innovation was destructive as a radical departure from the past and the substitution of existing institutions of the state with potentially dangerous experiments. … The Conservative believes, as Burke and the Founders did, that prudence must be exercised in assessing change. Prudence is the highest virtue for it is judgment drawn on wisdom. The proposed change should be informed by the experience, knowledge, and traditions of society, tailored for a specific purpose, and accomplished through a constitutional construct that ensures thoughtful deliberation by the community.”
Now, President Obama was elected more or less on a platform of change, and it’s become one of the catch phrases of his administration. Do you see the major proposals of the Obama administration for change in the Burkean tradition of reform or in the radical tradition of innovation?
Levin: I see them in the Marxist tradition of innovation, quote unquote. And Burke would be disgusted, and Adam Smith would be disgusted, and the Founding Fathers would be disgusted because what Burke rejected was the French Revolution, which was an assault on the institutions of French society as opposed to a righteous revolution, he felt.
Jeffrey: Quite different from our own.
Levin: Quite different from our own. He supported the American Revolution, which was tough for him because he was also a royalist. But no, we conservatives don’t oppose change. I mean, after all there’s a lot in this society we’d like to change, given what the statists have been doing to it.
Jeffrey: But that kind of change would be moving us back closer to our original principles.
Levin: Exactly. The goal is to preserve and improve our society, not to destroy it, not to transform it into something that’s foreign, not to spread misery, not to address the grievance of every malcontent. No, the purpose is to improve our society. So we support change as reform as opposed to change as innovation or change as destruction.
Jeffrey: Right, and you believe Obama is actually trying to effect a little mini-French Revolution right here in the United States?
Levin: Well, they can’t have it both ways, the Obama administration. Aren’t they telling us that? They want to change the way the automobile industry works. They want to change the way the energy industry works. They want to change the way the health care system works. They want to decide who gets paid what. They want to decide who gets rewarded, who gets punished, who gets rights, who doesn’t get rights. I’m accepting them at face value and putting a label on it.
Jeffrey: All of this out of the centralized government here in Washington, D.C.
Levin: Of course.
Jeffrey: Now, you talk in this book about an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, Mark. You say, “The Conservative is an originalist, for he believes that much like a contract, the Constitution sets forth certain terms and conditions for governing that hold the same meaning today as they did yesterday and should tomorrow. It connects one generation to the next by restraining the present generation from societal experimentation and government excess. There really is no other standard by which the Constitution can be interpreted without abandoning its underlying principles altogether.”
Now, in “Men in Black,” you talked about how the Supreme Court has basically been destroying the Constitution by interpreting it in a way that is not at all connected to the original interpretation.
But isn’t it true that the legislative branches and the executive branch do the exact same thing, and it’s been done not just by Democrats but also by Republicans? For example, President Bush, when he was in office, he pushed for the Medicare Prescription Drug Program. Can that in any way be justified in terms of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution?
Levin: No, it can’t. But, you know, at least we, the people, can do something about it by the next election cycle--changing our government, the representative part of our government. The problem with the judiciary is you have people that serve for life and act like politicians. And since it’s turned out that they have the final say, not that the Constitution gives them the final say, but they have seized the final say in our system, that’s the problem.
So if you have nine justices, really if you have five justices who decide that terrorists have due process rights for the first time in American history, reversing a decision they made in 1950 in another case, when these terrorists are held overseas, well, how do you change that? You can’t change that anymore under our system. So what’s happened is the judiciary seized authority that does not belong to it, the other branches have acquiesced to this authority.
But there’s no question, the federal government as a whole violates the Constitution on a regular basis. They conspire--and I don’t mean this in a devious way, I mean it out in the open, brazenly--against the individual, they conspire against the states, they conspire to skirt their constitutional limits.
And I also say in the book that the statist, or the leftist, likes it that way. He likes the court being as powerful as it is, or the bureaucracy being as powerful as it is, because it institutionalizes their philosophy and no election can reverse it.
Jeffrey: Right, and moves it away from the representative process.
Levin: From the people, yeah.
Jeffrey: It’s interesting, I interviewed Judge Bork a few months ago and I asked him: Did he believe Medicare and Social Security were constitutional? And he said, no, they’re not constitutional. But he argued that it’s politically impossible to go back and reverse that now, even though they were created by the legislature with the president. They’ve been in place so long that it’s just practically impossible to reverse them.
Levin: Well, they’re going to be reversed, because they’re going to collapse. We’re talking Medicare, Medicaid and Society Security, over $50 trillion in unfunded obligations that are growing by several trillion dollars every year. On top of that, it appears we’re going to get national health care. So they’re going to get reversed. It may not be done politically, but it will be done economically because the laws of economics speak to a higher authority.
Jeffrey: So you talk in “Liberty & Tyranny” about this $53 trillion in unfunded liabilities we have in these welfare-state dependency programs that President Bush added to with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan. President Obama wants to add to it in form some sort of national health care plan.
Levin: Right.
Jeffrey: So you say we have an electorate, Mark, that doesn’t want to reform these things or get rid of them. I mean, don’t we face a very big crisis that’s political as well as fiscal?
Levin: Here’s the problem. You know, Ronald Reagan built a pretty darn good foundation with conservative principles. Was it perfect? No. But it was the most perfect in my lifetime. And you would expect the next Republican president and Republican presidents subsequent to them to build on that foundation.
They didn’t. They lurched back to FDR New Dealism and Great Society. And for some reason, Republicans seem to think they don’t have the ability to slowly explain things to the American people and reverse course. They do, but they won’t because it’s hard work. It’s easier to go along.
Of course you can’t abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even though they will be abolished one day by their own weight. There’s no question about it in my mind. But what you can do is introduce some real reforms that slowly unravel them in the sense that people who really don’t need them shouldn’t get them. There should be limits on them. There should be private aspects to them.
Look, the statist knows exactly what he’s doing. I explain in the book why Social Security was created the way it was created. As opposed to a welfare program for poor people, FDR wanted to imprison everybody in the system. Lyndon Johnson wanted to use that trust fund for general obligations. This is all intended to build a political base, so if anybody dares to question these entitlements, they’ll be defeated. What we have to do is explain to the next generation: Do you understand that these programs are broke? Do you understand that you owe all this money? And explain it in a way that’s understandable.
Jeffrey: Right, in Social Security they created a welfare-state program that goes to middle-class people.
Levin: And that’s the purpose of national health care, is to suck everybody in, to make them to believe they’re getting something for nothing, when in fact what they’re getting is rationing.
Jeffrey: You get national health care--you already have Social Security which makes retired people, elderly people, dependent on the government. You have national health care that gets everybody, not just people on Medicare/Medicaid, dependent on the government for health care. And, essentially, a government-run school system for the majority of people. The sectors of our life that are controlled and dominated by the government are growing.
Levin: This is intentional. And that’s why, at this point, if we’re not going to stand up to it as conservatives, we’re not going to be confident in our principles, if we’re not going to do the things we have to do, which includes speaking out about our principles--You know, I’m constantly told, “Well, we can’t win that way.” You know, the last president to win landslides was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president in my lifetime. And they said he couldn’t win either, and he actually did take a chunk out of Social Security even though--
Jeffrey: The liberal media said he couldn’t win.
Levin: The liberal media said he couldn’t win. Even a lot of Republicans said he couldn’t win.
Jeffrey: One of the things I find unique about your book, and also about your radio program, is you’ re one of the few conservatives who will directly attack FDR and the New Deal, and describe exactly what it was that FDR--Why have so many Republicans basically made peace with FDR and the New Deal?
Levin: Well, even the books that criticize FDR are careful not to criticize him too hard. Because it’s harder to step back and discuss with your constituents, if you’re a politician, why certain programs they like and may think they benefit from but which will undermine our society in the long run, are not the greatest programs ever created.
There is no Social Security program. There is no trust fund. It is a hoax. Milton Friedman spoke about it and wrote about it at length. Many people have. There is no trust fund. As a matter of fact, as of February, even the fake trust fund that they say exists just went negative. So, even the illusion is an illusion. And that’s intentional. And Medicare is a hybrid of a phony insurance program and a welfare program. Medicaid now consumes over 20 percent of every state’s budget, so states have very little room to operate as well.
Jeffrey: So we’re looking at a situation 10, 15 years down the road, when the deficit driven by sustaining these programs, Medicare and Social Security not to mention a possible national health care plan that Obama may create, is so big it’s impossible for the government not to deal with it.
Levin: My fear is the way the government will deal with it is to claim more private property and liberty. And in some ways, when I say enslave, I don’t mean in terms of a Gulag, but enslave the next generation by limiting their freedom and limiting their opportunities.
Jeffrey: Well, this is something that I think conservatives have to think through strategically, that Americans have to start thinking about. There’s this $53 trillion already that the government has promised to pay people in benefits, that we don’t have the tax revenue under the current system to pay for.
Levin: And never will.
Jeffrey: It’s fiscally impossible to maintain an economy. But when this crisis hits, the government is going to want to go and get revenue to cover that as it progresses. Where are they going to get it?
Levin: They’re not going to have any revenue to get. And they can print all the money they want and create a Weimar Republic if they want. Every avenue they take is anti-liberty, anti-constitutional. They’re going to become more and more desperate. And what’s really going to happen is they’re going to seize much more authority and ration wealth, and the people who think Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are so great, there will be no Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
Jeffrey: Because the real-life situation is, you’ll have Baby Boom Generation on Social Security and Medicare, sucking in the government revenue, and the government will not be able to pay the benefits that it has promised to these folks unless they take 40, 50 percent of the income of middle-class, middle-aged people to cover those benefits.
Levin: What the government will do is break all of its promises. What the government will do is say, “We’re changing age limits, we’re changing benefits, we’re changing how this thing is funded.”
Jeffrey: We’re taking away your health-care benefits when you’re 70 years old.
Levin: We’re taking away whatever we have to take away. This is how authoritarianism works. If you look in Britain today--and I wish we would more often--or Canada for that matter, they have a complete rationing system in their health care. And the costly drugs and the costly procedures are delayed and delayed and delayed because they’re hoping a significant portion of the population will die before they have to pay for them, or go somewhere else.
I try to explain in this book in many ways that it’s conservatism that is compassionate, that it’s conservatism that nurtures liberty, that it’s conservatism that is the only anecdote to tyranny--whether it’s a soft tyranny or a hard tyranny--that what these other people are preaching is something that cannot work, has never worked in human history, and relies on a lie about some kind of a utopianism that can be created on Earth which simply can’t be.
Jeffrey: Is the question when we get to the tipping point? If the conservative vision of America is individuals and their families taking care of themselves. They earn their own money. They educate their own kids. They pay for their own housing. They pay for their own food. They pay for their own retirement. They’re self-sufficient. The liberal vision is the government takes care of many of those things, and, as you said, that’s fiscally unsustainable.
Levin: The liberal vision is, to be even more precise, that the individual needs to be controlled, that his aspirations need to be limited, that he has to learn to get along and go along. And that if that means dispiriting the individual, if that means economic or other forms or repression, then so be it for the good of the general society. And that a handful of individuals, self-appointed, who assume power one way or another, they will make the decisions for all the rest of us. In one form or another, that’s what the statist believes.
Now, they may unwittingly advance the case of tyranny in some cases, but at this point, given human history, given all we know about it, given all we know about statism, I have to question that.
Jeffrey: Well, Mark, if there’s theoretically a tipping point, where a number of people in the population are so dependent on the government that they are essentially a captive electorate for the left, for the liberals, how do conservatives reach out and persuade those folks on the margin to come back into the land of individual responsibility and self-reliance?
Levin: It’s the folks on the margins we need to go after.
Jeffrey: How do we do it?
Levin: The others are a hopeless case. The one-third, the 35 or 40 percent, we’re never going to get them. Well first of all, we, the conservative, need to be confident in who we are. We need to understand our philosophy beyond the superficial.
When I started this book, “Liberty & Tyranny,” I could have written one of these talking-point books, but I said, “You know, let me challenge myself. Why do I think the way I think? Why am I a conservative? What does it mean to be a conservative? And I went back, again, and I read the classics. I went into Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and Montesquieu and Locke, and more forward, Burke, and Adam Smith, and then the Founding Fathers. When you do that, which most people won’t do because they don’t have the time or the inclination to it, you come to an obvious conclusion that the only humane system that can possibly work is one that’s based on the conservative philosophy.
And what is the conservative philosophy? That’s the point of the book. The conservative philosophy, generally speaking, is the creation of a civil society with the focus on the individual, but not exclusively. Where the individual is responsible for his family and himself, where he has a duty to his community, where what he earns through his own labor--because remember, we’re only here so long on the face of the Earth, and that labor, whether it’s intellectual or physical or both, if somebody takes it from you, they’re enslaving you, it’s for an illegitimate purpose.
And there is a moral order. You know, it’s interesting. Adam Smith, who’s the hero of libertarians and one of my heroes, believed in a moral order, was a religious man. He and Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism--Burke, the conservative today, Smith, the libertarian today--they were friends and they didn’t think they disagreed on anything, these two guys. You know, they had an overlapping philosophy.
We conservatives wake up every morning and we thank God we’re in America. We thank God for our system of government. We thank God for this society. It is a magnificent place where we are. History has never seen this before. It is a contribution to mankind. We Americans, when we do what we do. We need to instill this spirit, this view of America, in the population or the population that may be receptive to it, because the other side has as their goal to dispirit, to demoralize, to tear down, to trash.
Jeffrey: Now, you do an excellent job in “Liberty & Tyranny,” Mark, in explaining these basic founding principles of the United States and how they articulate themselves in various different issue areas that we talked about. And your book is doing tremendously well: Four weeks at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. I think you told me more than 900,000 copies--
Levin: Printed, half of a million sold, and we’re still pressing ahead, baby.
Jeffrey: But obviously these are adults who are buying your book.
Levin: We don’t know who is. They’re not children, we know that.
Jeffrey: We know they’re not kids. But is it--our schools are not teaching the founding principles of the United States to kids in kindergarten, first and second grade, let alone in high school or college. Do you think the liberals, the left in America, does not want young people coming up in America to learn these principles and to embrace them as they grow?
Levin: Here’s the thing. First of all, it’s my responsibility and your responsibility as fathers to make sure our children know why this is a great country. There’s no teacher, there’s no union member, there’s no administrator in any government school system who can do a better job of explaining it than you and me to our own kids at the breakfast table, the dinner table, when we put them to sleep, when we take them somewhere. This we must do, because if we do it there are tens of millions of us, and we are a bigger army than ACORN and the NEA.
Now, as to your question: The motives? We’ve litigated against the NEA now here in Landmark Legal Foundation for over a decade. They are a far-left, power-hungry organization. And that’s what comes first, second and third for them. Okay. If they cared about the children, they wouldn’t be promoting what they promote. For instance, you have teacher strikes in the states that allow them and cities that allow them. It’s absolutely outrageous. So, and I’m talking about the rule, not the exception, because of course we know that there are many good teachers. My wife was a teacher, my mother was a teacher. That’s quite beside the point.
Jeffrey: But they have a vision for what they want your child to grow up to be.
Levin: They want our children to be good soldiers of the bureaucracy.
Jeffrey: Right. It’s one thing for you and me to raise our kids to have our understanding of what the American founding principles are like. And if they are in one of those schools to fight some of their teachers, to fight the school bureaucracy, to fight the overall agenda of the school. Isn’t it quite another thing for immigrant kids, or kids coming out of families where their parents may not be as well-educated or not as focused on teaching those things, to ever in fact come in contact with these principles?
Levin: It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster, because first of all, if we are not insisting on immigrant kids learning English, they can’t possibly understand the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. We have people who understand English who don’t understand them today and refuse to understand them because they talk about living and breathing documents. When we say originalism--look at the words and try and relate them back to our history--if you don’t understand English, where the words can be debated, and you’re speaking in Spanish or something, you’re never going to get it. And the other problem is, how do you enter into contracts, how do you make something of yourself? And, of course, the Balkanization issue is real and it is a huge problem.
Look, here’s the problem. You and I know that at every level we’re under attack. We know the next shoe to drop is to create citizenship for illegal aliens and to open the borders to more because they want to change the demography and they want to change the electorate. We know this.
We know what they want to do with national health care. It’s not about making sure people have health care. You know, just because you have a health care policy, doesn’t mean you actually get health care, timely and in quality. No, it’s to secure as many drone-like citizens as you possibly can.
We know what they’re up to, and at bottom, what I’m saying is, we have to reacquaint ourselves with why we are a great nation, with who we are, with our founding, with our history, and what it is that makes humanity prosper and flourish. Everything Obama does counteracts that. Everything that this Congress is doing counteracts that. And people will be motivated and they’ll have a desire to really change things if they can really connect with it, and that’s the point of the book.
Jeffrey: Mark, in your book you point to a uniting principle that has been an American principle since the beginning. You say, “If man is ‘endowed by [the] Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ he is endowed with these rights no matter his religion or whether he has allegiance to any religion. It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights—rights that are not conferred on man by man and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man. It is the divine nature of Natural Law that makes permanent man’s right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
Doesn’t this principle, and that fact that it is in fact true, give us an opportunity to reach out and proselytize to the immigrant community that’s come into the United States, to some of the people that are on the margin of wondering whether they’re going to go into the dependent class or into the class of self-reliant people?
Levin: I think it is. The problem we have now, though, is assimilation rarely happens. We have a government that’s opposed to it, that promotes the opposite: multiculturalism, bilingualism, dual citizenship. We now have corporations that promote both English and Spanish and we have a government school system that does the same thing. So we’re basically a bilingual nation now.
Jeffrey: And this principle can’t be taught in our public schools.
Levin: This principle can be taught in our public schools not as it is meant to be, but as sort of an arcane thought that the founders may have had--and of course they were slave owners so why pay attention to them anyway?
Jeffrey: If, ultimately, the reason the state cannot deprive us of our rights is because the state didn’t give us those rights, God gave us those rights, and a public school cannot even teach a child that there is a God from whom he got those rights, then a public school cannot teach the basic founding principle of the United States.
Levin: No. You have to do it, and I have to do it, and every parent and grandparent have to do it. Look, we are not going to change these government schools overnight. This I know as a matter of personal experience in litigation. We have to take it upon ourselves. We’ve had a counterrevolution in this country--a very successful counterrevolution, the intellectual basis of which goes back to the early 1900s, the effectuating of it started with FDR and the New Deal. It’s a counterrevolution to the American Revolution. Now we need a counter-counterrevolution, and one of the things I say is that we conservatives have to increase our numbers. That’s the purpose of a book like this, and hopefully other books that follow, and parents and grandparents talking to their children, and getting serious about the country and the future for the next generation.
Politics has consequences. It’s not just a sport to observe. People need to realize that right now we have a runaway government--and I mean every branch of it, the elected and the unelected--and the only way we’re going to stop this is if the next generation understands and is informed. And you’re not going to get it from an NEA member in a school system. If you do, it’ll be the rare, tenured teacher who does it. It’s going to have to come from you, and we can do this.
I mean, there’s still tens of millions of us who understand how wonderful this country is and believe in free markets, private property, faith and these other things. We can do this. You know, everybody can’t home school their kids, but there is a form of home schooling everybody can do. Those kids do come home, and they belong to us, and let’s do it.
Jeffrey: And they can read “Liberty & Tyranny,” the No. 1 New York Times Best-seller by Mark Levin. Mark, thank you very much.
Levin: Thank you brother, pleasure.
Here is the transcript (emphasis added):
Jeffrey: “For Edmund Burke, change as reform was intended to preserve and improve the basic institutions of the state. Change as innovation was destructive as a radical departure from the past and the substitution of existing institutions of the state with potentially dangerous experiments. … The Conservative believes, as Burke and the Founders did, that prudence must be exercised in assessing change. Prudence is the highest virtue for it is judgment drawn on wisdom. The proposed change should be informed by the experience, knowledge, and traditions of society, tailored for a specific purpose, and accomplished through a constitutional construct that ensures thoughtful deliberation by the community.”
Now, President Obama was elected more or less on a platform of change, and it’s become one of the catch phrases of his administration. Do you see the major proposals of the Obama administration for change in the Burkean tradition of reform or in the radical tradition of innovation?
Levin: I see them in the Marxist tradition of innovation, quote unquote. And Burke would be disgusted, and Adam Smith would be disgusted, and the Founding Fathers would be disgusted because what Burke rejected was the French Revolution, which was an assault on the institutions of French society as opposed to a righteous revolution, he felt.
Jeffrey: Quite different from our own.
Levin: Quite different from our own. He supported the American Revolution, which was tough for him because he was also a royalist. But no, we conservatives don’t oppose change. I mean, after all there’s a lot in this society we’d like to change, given what the statists have been doing to it.
Jeffrey: But that kind of change would be moving us back closer to our original principles.
Levin: Exactly. The goal is to preserve and improve our society, not to destroy it, not to transform it into something that’s foreign, not to spread misery, not to address the grievance of every malcontent. No, the purpose is to improve our society. So we support change as reform as opposed to change as innovation or change as destruction.
Jeffrey: Right, and you believe Obama is actually trying to effect a little mini-French Revolution right here in the United States?
Levin: Well, they can’t have it both ways, the Obama administration. Aren’t they telling us that? They want to change the way the automobile industry works. They want to change the way the energy industry works. They want to change the way the health care system works. They want to decide who gets paid what. They want to decide who gets rewarded, who gets punished, who gets rights, who doesn’t get rights. I’m accepting them at face value and putting a label on it.
Jeffrey: All of this out of the centralized government here in Washington, D.C.
Levin: Of course.
Jeffrey: Now, you talk in this book about an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, Mark. You say, “The Conservative is an originalist, for he believes that much like a contract, the Constitution sets forth certain terms and conditions for governing that hold the same meaning today as they did yesterday and should tomorrow. It connects one generation to the next by restraining the present generation from societal experimentation and government excess. There really is no other standard by which the Constitution can be interpreted without abandoning its underlying principles altogether.”
Now, in “Men in Black,” you talked about how the Supreme Court has basically been destroying the Constitution by interpreting it in a way that is not at all connected to the original interpretation.
But isn’t it true that the legislative branches and the executive branch do the exact same thing, and it’s been done not just by Democrats but also by Republicans? For example, President Bush, when he was in office, he pushed for the Medicare Prescription Drug Program. Can that in any way be justified in terms of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution?
Levin: No, it can’t. But, you know, at least we, the people, can do something about it by the next election cycle--changing our government, the representative part of our government. The problem with the judiciary is you have people that serve for life and act like politicians. And since it’s turned out that they have the final say, not that the Constitution gives them the final say, but they have seized the final say in our system, that’s the problem.
So if you have nine justices, really if you have five justices who decide that terrorists have due process rights for the first time in American history, reversing a decision they made in 1950 in another case, when these terrorists are held overseas, well, how do you change that? You can’t change that anymore under our system. So what’s happened is the judiciary seized authority that does not belong to it, the other branches have acquiesced to this authority.
But there’s no question, the federal government as a whole violates the Constitution on a regular basis. They conspire--and I don’t mean this in a devious way, I mean it out in the open, brazenly--against the individual, they conspire against the states, they conspire to skirt their constitutional limits.
And I also say in the book that the statist, or the leftist, likes it that way. He likes the court being as powerful as it is, or the bureaucracy being as powerful as it is, because it institutionalizes their philosophy and no election can reverse it.
Jeffrey: Right, and moves it away from the representative process.
Levin: From the people, yeah.
Jeffrey: It’s interesting, I interviewed Judge Bork a few months ago and I asked him: Did he believe Medicare and Social Security were constitutional? And he said, no, they’re not constitutional. But he argued that it’s politically impossible to go back and reverse that now, even though they were created by the legislature with the president. They’ve been in place so long that it’s just practically impossible to reverse them.
Levin: Well, they’re going to be reversed, because they’re going to collapse. We’re talking Medicare, Medicaid and Society Security, over $50 trillion in unfunded obligations that are growing by several trillion dollars every year. On top of that, it appears we’re going to get national health care. So they’re going to get reversed. It may not be done politically, but it will be done economically because the laws of economics speak to a higher authority.
Jeffrey: So you talk in “Liberty & Tyranny” about this $53 trillion in unfunded liabilities we have in these welfare-state dependency programs that President Bush added to with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan. President Obama wants to add to it in form some sort of national health care plan.
Levin: Right.
Jeffrey: So you say we have an electorate, Mark, that doesn’t want to reform these things or get rid of them. I mean, don’t we face a very big crisis that’s political as well as fiscal?
Levin: Here’s the problem. You know, Ronald Reagan built a pretty darn good foundation with conservative principles. Was it perfect? No. But it was the most perfect in my lifetime. And you would expect the next Republican president and Republican presidents subsequent to them to build on that foundation.
They didn’t. They lurched back to FDR New Dealism and Great Society. And for some reason, Republicans seem to think they don’t have the ability to slowly explain things to the American people and reverse course. They do, but they won’t because it’s hard work. It’s easier to go along.
Of course you can’t abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even though they will be abolished one day by their own weight. There’s no question about it in my mind. But what you can do is introduce some real reforms that slowly unravel them in the sense that people who really don’t need them shouldn’t get them. There should be limits on them. There should be private aspects to them.
Look, the statist knows exactly what he’s doing. I explain in the book why Social Security was created the way it was created. As opposed to a welfare program for poor people, FDR wanted to imprison everybody in the system. Lyndon Johnson wanted to use that trust fund for general obligations. This is all intended to build a political base, so if anybody dares to question these entitlements, they’ll be defeated. What we have to do is explain to the next generation: Do you understand that these programs are broke? Do you understand that you owe all this money? And explain it in a way that’s understandable.
Jeffrey: Right, in Social Security they created a welfare-state program that goes to middle-class people.
Levin: And that’s the purpose of national health care, is to suck everybody in, to make them to believe they’re getting something for nothing, when in fact what they’re getting is rationing.
Jeffrey: You get national health care--you already have Social Security which makes retired people, elderly people, dependent on the government. You have national health care that gets everybody, not just people on Medicare/Medicaid, dependent on the government for health care. And, essentially, a government-run school system for the majority of people. The sectors of our life that are controlled and dominated by the government are growing.
Levin: This is intentional. And that’s why, at this point, if we’re not going to stand up to it as conservatives, we’re not going to be confident in our principles, if we’re not going to do the things we have to do, which includes speaking out about our principles--You know, I’m constantly told, “Well, we can’t win that way.” You know, the last president to win landslides was Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president in my lifetime. And they said he couldn’t win either, and he actually did take a chunk out of Social Security even though--
Jeffrey: The liberal media said he couldn’t win.
Levin: The liberal media said he couldn’t win. Even a lot of Republicans said he couldn’t win.
Jeffrey: One of the things I find unique about your book, and also about your radio program, is you’ re one of the few conservatives who will directly attack FDR and the New Deal, and describe exactly what it was that FDR--Why have so many Republicans basically made peace with FDR and the New Deal?
Levin: Well, even the books that criticize FDR are careful not to criticize him too hard. Because it’s harder to step back and discuss with your constituents, if you’re a politician, why certain programs they like and may think they benefit from but which will undermine our society in the long run, are not the greatest programs ever created.
There is no Social Security program. There is no trust fund. It is a hoax. Milton Friedman spoke about it and wrote about it at length. Many people have. There is no trust fund. As a matter of fact, as of February, even the fake trust fund that they say exists just went negative. So, even the illusion is an illusion. And that’s intentional. And Medicare is a hybrid of a phony insurance program and a welfare program. Medicaid now consumes over 20 percent of every state’s budget, so states have very little room to operate as well.
Jeffrey: So we’re looking at a situation 10, 15 years down the road, when the deficit driven by sustaining these programs, Medicare and Social Security not to mention a possible national health care plan that Obama may create, is so big it’s impossible for the government not to deal with it.
Levin: My fear is the way the government will deal with it is to claim more private property and liberty. And in some ways, when I say enslave, I don’t mean in terms of a Gulag, but enslave the next generation by limiting their freedom and limiting their opportunities.
Jeffrey: Well, this is something that I think conservatives have to think through strategically, that Americans have to start thinking about. There’s this $53 trillion already that the government has promised to pay people in benefits, that we don’t have the tax revenue under the current system to pay for.
Levin: And never will.
Jeffrey: It’s fiscally impossible to maintain an economy. But when this crisis hits, the government is going to want to go and get revenue to cover that as it progresses. Where are they going to get it?
Levin: They’re not going to have any revenue to get. And they can print all the money they want and create a Weimar Republic if they want. Every avenue they take is anti-liberty, anti-constitutional. They’re going to become more and more desperate. And what’s really going to happen is they’re going to seize much more authority and ration wealth, and the people who think Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are so great, there will be no Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
Jeffrey: Because the real-life situation is, you’ll have Baby Boom Generation on Social Security and Medicare, sucking in the government revenue, and the government will not be able to pay the benefits that it has promised to these folks unless they take 40, 50 percent of the income of middle-class, middle-aged people to cover those benefits.
Levin: What the government will do is break all of its promises. What the government will do is say, “We’re changing age limits, we’re changing benefits, we’re changing how this thing is funded.”
Jeffrey: We’re taking away your health-care benefits when you’re 70 years old.
Levin: We’re taking away whatever we have to take away. This is how authoritarianism works. If you look in Britain today--and I wish we would more often--or Canada for that matter, they have a complete rationing system in their health care. And the costly drugs and the costly procedures are delayed and delayed and delayed because they’re hoping a significant portion of the population will die before they have to pay for them, or go somewhere else.
I try to explain in this book in many ways that it’s conservatism that is compassionate, that it’s conservatism that nurtures liberty, that it’s conservatism that is the only anecdote to tyranny--whether it’s a soft tyranny or a hard tyranny--that what these other people are preaching is something that cannot work, has never worked in human history, and relies on a lie about some kind of a utopianism that can be created on Earth which simply can’t be.
Jeffrey: Is the question when we get to the tipping point? If the conservative vision of America is individuals and their families taking care of themselves. They earn their own money. They educate their own kids. They pay for their own housing. They pay for their own food. They pay for their own retirement. They’re self-sufficient. The liberal vision is the government takes care of many of those things, and, as you said, that’s fiscally unsustainable.
Levin: The liberal vision is, to be even more precise, that the individual needs to be controlled, that his aspirations need to be limited, that he has to learn to get along and go along. And that if that means dispiriting the individual, if that means economic or other forms or repression, then so be it for the good of the general society. And that a handful of individuals, self-appointed, who assume power one way or another, they will make the decisions for all the rest of us. In one form or another, that’s what the statist believes.
Now, they may unwittingly advance the case of tyranny in some cases, but at this point, given human history, given all we know about it, given all we know about statism, I have to question that.
Jeffrey: Well, Mark, if there’s theoretically a tipping point, where a number of people in the population are so dependent on the government that they are essentially a captive electorate for the left, for the liberals, how do conservatives reach out and persuade those folks on the margin to come back into the land of individual responsibility and self-reliance?
Levin: It’s the folks on the margins we need to go after.
Jeffrey: How do we do it?
Levin: The others are a hopeless case. The one-third, the 35 or 40 percent, we’re never going to get them. Well first of all, we, the conservative, need to be confident in who we are. We need to understand our philosophy beyond the superficial.
When I started this book, “Liberty & Tyranny,” I could have written one of these talking-point books, but I said, “You know, let me challenge myself. Why do I think the way I think? Why am I a conservative? What does it mean to be a conservative? And I went back, again, and I read the classics. I went into Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and Montesquieu and Locke, and more forward, Burke, and Adam Smith, and then the Founding Fathers. When you do that, which most people won’t do because they don’t have the time or the inclination to it, you come to an obvious conclusion that the only humane system that can possibly work is one that’s based on the conservative philosophy.
And what is the conservative philosophy? That’s the point of the book. The conservative philosophy, generally speaking, is the creation of a civil society with the focus on the individual, but not exclusively. Where the individual is responsible for his family and himself, where he has a duty to his community, where what he earns through his own labor--because remember, we’re only here so long on the face of the Earth, and that labor, whether it’s intellectual or physical or both, if somebody takes it from you, they’re enslaving you, it’s for an illegitimate purpose.
And there is a moral order. You know, it’s interesting. Adam Smith, who’s the hero of libertarians and one of my heroes, believed in a moral order, was a religious man. He and Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism--Burke, the conservative today, Smith, the libertarian today--they were friends and they didn’t think they disagreed on anything, these two guys. You know, they had an overlapping philosophy.
We conservatives wake up every morning and we thank God we’re in America. We thank God for our system of government. We thank God for this society. It is a magnificent place where we are. History has never seen this before. It is a contribution to mankind. We Americans, when we do what we do. We need to instill this spirit, this view of America, in the population or the population that may be receptive to it, because the other side has as their goal to dispirit, to demoralize, to tear down, to trash.
Jeffrey: Now, you do an excellent job in “Liberty & Tyranny,” Mark, in explaining these basic founding principles of the United States and how they articulate themselves in various different issue areas that we talked about. And your book is doing tremendously well: Four weeks at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. I think you told me more than 900,000 copies--
Levin: Printed, half of a million sold, and we’re still pressing ahead, baby.
Jeffrey: But obviously these are adults who are buying your book.
Levin: We don’t know who is. They’re not children, we know that.
Jeffrey: We know they’re not kids. But is it--our schools are not teaching the founding principles of the United States to kids in kindergarten, first and second grade, let alone in high school or college. Do you think the liberals, the left in America, does not want young people coming up in America to learn these principles and to embrace them as they grow?
Levin: Here’s the thing. First of all, it’s my responsibility and your responsibility as fathers to make sure our children know why this is a great country. There’s no teacher, there’s no union member, there’s no administrator in any government school system who can do a better job of explaining it than you and me to our own kids at the breakfast table, the dinner table, when we put them to sleep, when we take them somewhere. This we must do, because if we do it there are tens of millions of us, and we are a bigger army than ACORN and the NEA.
Now, as to your question: The motives? We’ve litigated against the NEA now here in Landmark Legal Foundation for over a decade. They are a far-left, power-hungry organization. And that’s what comes first, second and third for them. Okay. If they cared about the children, they wouldn’t be promoting what they promote. For instance, you have teacher strikes in the states that allow them and cities that allow them. It’s absolutely outrageous. So, and I’m talking about the rule, not the exception, because of course we know that there are many good teachers. My wife was a teacher, my mother was a teacher. That’s quite beside the point.
Jeffrey: But they have a vision for what they want your child to grow up to be.
Levin: They want our children to be good soldiers of the bureaucracy.
Jeffrey: Right. It’s one thing for you and me to raise our kids to have our understanding of what the American founding principles are like. And if they are in one of those schools to fight some of their teachers, to fight the school bureaucracy, to fight the overall agenda of the school. Isn’t it quite another thing for immigrant kids, or kids coming out of families where their parents may not be as well-educated or not as focused on teaching those things, to ever in fact come in contact with these principles?
Levin: It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster, because first of all, if we are not insisting on immigrant kids learning English, they can’t possibly understand the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. We have people who understand English who don’t understand them today and refuse to understand them because they talk about living and breathing documents. When we say originalism--look at the words and try and relate them back to our history--if you don’t understand English, where the words can be debated, and you’re speaking in Spanish or something, you’re never going to get it. And the other problem is, how do you enter into contracts, how do you make something of yourself? And, of course, the Balkanization issue is real and it is a huge problem.
Look, here’s the problem. You and I know that at every level we’re under attack. We know the next shoe to drop is to create citizenship for illegal aliens and to open the borders to more because they want to change the demography and they want to change the electorate. We know this.
We know what they want to do with national health care. It’s not about making sure people have health care. You know, just because you have a health care policy, doesn’t mean you actually get health care, timely and in quality. No, it’s to secure as many drone-like citizens as you possibly can.
We know what they’re up to, and at bottom, what I’m saying is, we have to reacquaint ourselves with why we are a great nation, with who we are, with our founding, with our history, and what it is that makes humanity prosper and flourish. Everything Obama does counteracts that. Everything that this Congress is doing counteracts that. And people will be motivated and they’ll have a desire to really change things if they can really connect with it, and that’s the point of the book.
Jeffrey: Mark, in your book you point to a uniting principle that has been an American principle since the beginning. You say, “If man is ‘endowed by [the] Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ he is endowed with these rights no matter his religion or whether he has allegiance to any religion. It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights—rights that are not conferred on man by man and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man. It is the divine nature of Natural Law that makes permanent man’s right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
Doesn’t this principle, and that fact that it is in fact true, give us an opportunity to reach out and proselytize to the immigrant community that’s come into the United States, to some of the people that are on the margin of wondering whether they’re going to go into the dependent class or into the class of self-reliant people?
Levin: I think it is. The problem we have now, though, is assimilation rarely happens. We have a government that’s opposed to it, that promotes the opposite: multiculturalism, bilingualism, dual citizenship. We now have corporations that promote both English and Spanish and we have a government school system that does the same thing. So we’re basically a bilingual nation now.
Jeffrey: And this principle can’t be taught in our public schools.
Levin: This principle can be taught in our public schools not as it is meant to be, but as sort of an arcane thought that the founders may have had--and of course they were slave owners so why pay attention to them anyway?
Jeffrey: If, ultimately, the reason the state cannot deprive us of our rights is because the state didn’t give us those rights, God gave us those rights, and a public school cannot even teach a child that there is a God from whom he got those rights, then a public school cannot teach the basic founding principle of the United States.
Levin: No. You have to do it, and I have to do it, and every parent and grandparent have to do it. Look, we are not going to change these government schools overnight. This I know as a matter of personal experience in litigation. We have to take it upon ourselves. We’ve had a counterrevolution in this country--a very successful counterrevolution, the intellectual basis of which goes back to the early 1900s, the effectuating of it started with FDR and the New Deal. It’s a counterrevolution to the American Revolution. Now we need a counter-counterrevolution, and one of the things I say is that we conservatives have to increase our numbers. That’s the purpose of a book like this, and hopefully other books that follow, and parents and grandparents talking to their children, and getting serious about the country and the future for the next generation.
Politics has consequences. It’s not just a sport to observe. People need to realize that right now we have a runaway government--and I mean every branch of it, the elected and the unelected--and the only way we’re going to stop this is if the next generation understands and is informed. And you’re not going to get it from an NEA member in a school system. If you do, it’ll be the rare, tenured teacher who does it. It’s going to have to come from you, and we can do this.
I mean, there’s still tens of millions of us who understand how wonderful this country is and believe in free markets, private property, faith and these other things. We can do this. You know, everybody can’t home school their kids, but there is a form of home schooling everybody can do. Those kids do come home, and they belong to us, and let’s do it.
Jeffrey: And they can read “Liberty & Tyranny,” the No. 1 New York Times Best-seller by Mark Levin. Mark, thank you very much.
Levin: Thank you brother, pleasure.
Monday, April 6, 2009
All Calls For Unity Between The Left and The Right Are Dishonest
I like this Vlogger, his Youtube channel is How The World Works. His blog is called Copious Dissent. He is a very clear thinker and I really appreciate his posts. Check out what he says about PSBO & Company's position on nuclear weapons. It occurred to me that PSBO & Company were in college at the same time I was, we are children of the 80's. I actually remember going to a no nukes rally with a corny sign which read "You can't hug me with nuclear arms". I was so naive but I grew up. PSBO & Company seem not to have grown up but they are at the helm now and our national security is greatly compromised. Yet Obama acolytes are so consumed with Mrs. Obama's lovely toned arms and how she charmed the ever so easily charmed Socialists Europeans that they haven't even considered (at least judging by their blog postings) the implications of the North Korean missile launch this weekend.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Help Me Understand Field Negro's Alleged "Smackdown" of Shelby Steele's WSJ Op-ed
I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Steele's entire article Why The GOP Can't Win With Minorities. What is facinating to me is how the Field Negro responded to it as well as the bloggers over at Jack & Jill Politics who called Field Negroes response a "smackdown". I have been trying to process it from their prospective but I'm getting nowhere. So I have decided to just post what each said and perhaps someone can help me understand what is that I'm missing -- I hate it when I don't "get" it.
Shelby Steele writes: "The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.... What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other -- two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior."
The Field Negro responds: Right there, Shelby, is the problem with your well written essay. You only saw yourself as a person of color in two ways: "A racial determination of segregation" and the subject of "white" liberal paternalism. You should have said no to both of those choices. It wasn't one or the other. Both were destined to make you the man you became: Someone who chooses a selfish ideology which is predicated on chasing a carrot that you will never be able to grab. By embracing that ideology you have bought into the false premise that your people seek the liberal handout and are not willing to work as hard as the conservative to grab the carrot. It is not true. I submit to you that your people (and poor people of all colors) are willing to work harder. The problem is that their government has never been willing to work as hard for them. Instead, their government has worked only for a special few, and contrary to what you might believe, it didn't neglect you, it used you to achieve its own goals. At least with liberalism, with all its faults, there was a realization that it should make you a promise, and that promise was that never again will you be subjected to second class status, and our government will always work to make it so. Our government will finally give you an even playing field to compete on, after tipping the field against you for so long.
Shelby Steele writes:""So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures -- with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today's liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with -- even ascendant over -- conservatism because it addresses America's moral accountability to its past with moral activism. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?"
The Field Negro writes: "Sorry Shelby, it can't. And I, for one, am glad for that."
I just want to throw my hands up and say -- "Hopeless, let the "brain dead" bury the "brain dead". But Field Negro is an intelligent man and I have mad respect for him. It's nothing new for me to disagree with him as I ALWAYS do. But I just don't understand the point he is making here. Is it just me? Or, is the Field Negro indeed a real life personification of that which Mr. Steele describes in his article?
Shelby Steele writes: "The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.... What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other -- two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior."
The Field Negro responds: Right there, Shelby, is the problem with your well written essay. You only saw yourself as a person of color in two ways: "A racial determination of segregation" and the subject of "white" liberal paternalism. You should have said no to both of those choices. It wasn't one or the other. Both were destined to make you the man you became: Someone who chooses a selfish ideology which is predicated on chasing a carrot that you will never be able to grab. By embracing that ideology you have bought into the false premise that your people seek the liberal handout and are not willing to work as hard as the conservative to grab the carrot. It is not true. I submit to you that your people (and poor people of all colors) are willing to work harder. The problem is that their government has never been willing to work as hard for them. Instead, their government has worked only for a special few, and contrary to what you might believe, it didn't neglect you, it used you to achieve its own goals. At least with liberalism, with all its faults, there was a realization that it should make you a promise, and that promise was that never again will you be subjected to second class status, and our government will always work to make it so. Our government will finally give you an even playing field to compete on, after tipping the field against you for so long.
Shelby Steele writes:""So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures -- with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today's liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with -- even ascendant over -- conservatism because it addresses America's moral accountability to its past with moral activism. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?"
The Field Negro writes: "Sorry Shelby, it can't. And I, for one, am glad for that."
I just want to throw my hands up and say -- "Hopeless, let the "brain dead" bury the "brain dead". But Field Negro is an intelligent man and I have mad respect for him. It's nothing new for me to disagree with him as I ALWAYS do. But I just don't understand the point he is making here. Is it just me? Or, is the Field Negro indeed a real life personification of that which Mr. Steele describes in his article?
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Zo's Thoughts On Limbaugh, Steele, DL Hughley, And Those Pesky Liberal Elites
Zo says it all much better than I can so.....but, I'm not feeling the whole Michelle Malkin thing (no girl crush going on) but other than that he is soooo ON THE MONEY!!!
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