Finally.
From ‘The Diplomad’, a brief and accurate summary. Excerpt:
In short, his was a bravura performance which has left Venezuela awash in debt, crime, and poverty–the signature achievement of leftism everywhere in the world.
Thanks to Bill Keezer for the link.
And here’s another.
41 Comments
Canada, France, Australia, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Japan all have leftist governments. These countries all have generous social welfare programs, sharply progressive taxation, universal health care, and far more active governments than we would allow here. Some of them are – gasp! – even Socialist or quasi-Socialist.
Would you say that these countries are awash in debt, crime, and poverty?
Well, yes, I’d say that to the extent that these nations move toward a full embrace of the combined principles of modern Leftism — multiculturalism, radical nondiscrimination, secularization, mass Third World immigration, top-down control of the economy, centralization of government generally, and enforcement of income equality through confiscatory redistribution of wealth — they move in the direction of of national impoverishment and general decline. Many of these economies are already under tremendous strain, and crime rates are up sharply all over Europe in recent years. Britain has a violent-crime rate far higher than the U.S., and Sweden, for example, now has one of the highest rates of rape in the world — something that would have been unimaginable in our youth.
Is it possible to build a happy and successful nation upon moderate forms of socialism? Of course, and we’ve seen it done. But certain conditions must be met for it to work. In particular, some of the most important ones are: high social cohesion (supported by rational immigration policies), a culture (that’s ‘a’ culture, not a chaotic mixture of cultures) that expects industriousness and self-reliance, and a steady birthrate built on stable families. As those things start to go, the whole structure begins to rot.
We should note also that another very important factor in the happy socialism and generous public entitlements of places like Japan and Northern Europe over the past half-century or so has been that the United States has shouldered the enormous cost of their external security.
Beyond that, the farther you move to the Left the worse things get, as we saw throughout the 20th century, and still see in places like Cuba and North Korea. Rigidly enforced equality of economic outcomes comes at the price of national impoverishment, as well as a necessary increase in inequalities of power, calibrated by proximity to the ruling cadre or tyrant. Corruption and black markets and baksheesh become the society’s operating principles, and liberties wither away.
So in sum: yes, mild forms of socialism can work, under the right conditions. But economic socialism is only one aspect of modern Leftism, and not even its most dangerous.
So you think that the countries I’ve named – which meet most or all of the criteria in your first sentence – are impoverished and declining?
I’d certainly say they’re declining, without question. As for poverty, there’s a lot of ruin in a once-prosperous nation, but that’s the direction in which I think they’re headed. (We can check back in a few years and see if I’m right.) Some may still come to their senses before it’s too late. For others, like Britain, it’s too late now.
My main point is that the farther they go from here in pursuit of the pestilent combination of governing principles that characterize modern Leftism, the worse it’s going to get.
Britain is perhaps the saddest and most instructive lesson in the toxicity of modern Leftism’s lethal cocktail of ruinous doctrines. John Derbyshire last week gave what was, for a man of British blood like me, a terribly disheartening account, which I reproduce here:
I think that the citizens of these countries would be mightily surprised to hear that they are living in a state of decline, unless you think that peace and prosperity are bad things (with Israel, peace being a relative thing). If you look at metrics like longevity, education, or household income, you might even conclude that they have never had it better.
As for England: they have been in a steady state of decline since the days when they used gunboat diplomacy and ruthless colonialism to subjugate peoples around the globe. For many countries, it’s a good thing that the sun sets on the British empire every night. Moreover, since they have had many years of conservative leadership – from Margeret Thatcher to the current administration – I’m hard-pressed to understand why any putative failings are the fault of those abhorrent leftists.
Instead of pointing to aspects of liberalism you presonally dislike and concluding that they must inexorably lead to decline and decay, you might want to identify which countries are doing well and which are not.
The three most powerful major economies in the developed world are the US, Canada, and Australia. After that comes Germany and Japan. These five countries all have either leftist or centrist governments. Except for America, they all have universal health care, punitively high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, and income dispersions which are clustered around the middle.
The one country in the world which is most ascendant is China. Holy cow, they’re communist! That certainly doesn’t fit your thesis.
Instead of looking from the top down and adapting reality to fit doctrinal conservative beliefs, you might want to look from the bottom up to see which types of societies prosper and which do not.
I have just a couple of things to add:
First, China has strengthened its economy specifically by adopting key elements of capitalism. If it’s doing better now economically, it’s in spite of Communism, not because of it, as you well know. From 1958-1962 alone, as many as 38,000,000 Chinese people died as a direct result of Communist rule. It would not be unfair to call the centrally controlled Leftist regimes of the 20th century “mortocracies”, as death-by-government has, since the more extreme forms of Leftism took root, sheared away more people by far than war, crime, and plague combined.
Ask the ordinary native-born people of Wimbledon, or MalmÁ¶, or Brussels, or Athens, or Naples, or Clichy-sous-Bois, etc., whether they think their nation, their quality of life, and their quiet enjoyment of their historical culture is in decline. There’s a very good reason why nationalistic movements are rapidly gaining traction all over Europe, and in Australia too: the natives are waking up to the fact that their nationhood has been violated, and their homelands given away, by a disdainful, reality-denying, and oikophobic cadre of globalizing, multiculturalist left-wing bureaucrats. As I said, there are conditions under which modest forms of socialism can work just fine, but modern-day Leftism is much more than just moderate socialism, and a nation’s happiness depends on more than just economics.
As for the decline of the British Empire, and the universal improvement emanating therefrom, we might examine places like Zimbabwe, which since British rule has gone from bread-basket to basket-case. As for “many years of conservative rule”: I’ll give you Margaret Thatcher, but not whoever else you may have in mind, such as Tony Blair or David Cameron. Blair in particular has done more to accelerate Britain’s cultural destruction than any PM in history.
I’m not sure you read my comments above. Japan and Germany have had moderately socialist systems that functioned well for the reasons that I described — cohesive and homogeneous cultures of self-reliance and industriousness, with stable birthrates. As the various poisons of modern Leftism do their work — as birthrates and ethno-cultural homgeneity and social cohesion and self-reliance erode, and as power centralizes, and so takes down the mediating layers of civil society that make for happy and productive local life — you’ll see decline aplenty.
Sweden too has noticed a decline, and is starting to reverse it by adopting small government policies.
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-new-swedish-model#axzz2MWCQbatx
And I wouldn’t depend too much on China’s move to capitalism. Reports indicate that they have a government-created housing bubble, which will crash like ours, and they still use slave labor, which is more a left-wing sort of thing (I added that just to get on the one-eyed man’s nerves).
He’s got nerves of
steelrubber under trying circumstances, though in most circumstances he is very trying.(Pssst, Henry?
Just twixt us, that Spelchek thingie often makes us lose our trains of thought – One-Eye’s defending redistribution.
So, while in the midst of a comment don’t answer the phone, caller-ID’ll save it for you.
One-Eye does indeed have nerves of steal.)
Actually, he’s defending his godlet, Obama. But that’s a distinction without a difference, because, you know, commies of a feather steal together.
No, what’s happening here is that Peter is arguing as consistently as he can according to his political and moral axioms. He honestly believes, I think:
That Diversity is an unalloyed blessing;
That the steady migration of power from the States to the federal sovereign is a change for the better;
That a radically centralized federal government will always be a benevolent guardian of our happiness, and so we should have no fear of future encroachments of tyranny upon our liberties;
That as citizens of a modern society we should entrust our propserity, happiness and liberty to a benevolent, centralized government;
That as a “proposition nation” without any traditional culture whatsoever, or at least none worth preserving, the United States can happily absorb an unlimited number of immigrants without regard to their place and culture of origin;
…and so on. I do believe he actually means well. He’s a decent man, despite what I consider to be extraordinary naivetÁ©, and incomprehension of the lessons of history, for someone so intelligent and well-educated.
I, on the other hand, think his views will be the death of everything I love and esteem about our once-great Anglo-European, Judeo-Christian civilization, and will lead to the marginalization of America’s founding people in their own homeland.
http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/two-cheers-for-chavez/
Well, you got most of it right.
Diversity is an unalloyed blessing. As much as anything else, it is what made America great. The notion of America as a beacon of democracy, which attracted huddled masses from around the globe, is as American as Cheese Whiz and Maypo.
A strong federal government is a good thing. It is why the Articles of Confederaion were jettisoned for the Constitution. The powers of the federal government are limited by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, which is also a good thing. The government should be no bigger than it needs to be, but it needs to be pretty big.
We do have a traditional culture, but it is the product of every ethnic group which has come here, and is one of the blessings of diversity.
I care not a fig if America’s founding people are marginalized. The fact that white guys once ruled everything does not mean that they should rule everything in perpetuity, and I say that as a white guy.
One of the reasons why conservatism is losing its existential battle with irrelevance is that it is male, pale, and stale.
I live in a county which is majority non-white (counting Hispanics as non-white). It is not coincidental that this county is the epicenter of entrepreneurship and innovation, both nationally and globally.
Where you are wrong is that I never said that the government should be the “guardian of our happiness.” People will be happy or unhappy on their own, and the government has nothing to do with it. The essential fact of life is that it is nasty, brutish, and short, and there isn’t much the government can do about that.
Nor did I ever suggest that a central government will always be benevolent, wise, or trustworthy, or that it should have unlimited powers. Governments are no better than the people who lead them.
As for being naive and historically ignorant: that’s nonsense. In my view, it is a sign of naivete and ignorance to believe that the past was always better than the present, the future will ineluctably be worse than the present, or that change is always – or nearly always – a bad thing. There have been periods of American history as good as the one we’re in, but there are none which have been better. And given the numerous blessings which our country has, the best days are yet to come.
I should have noted that America’s founding people – its indigenous population – has already been marginalized.
Birds of a tether get fucked together.
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4868/full
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4868/full
I care not a fig whether he means well or not. A person is responsible for the damage they cause or enable, whether they mean it or not. And if he is as smart as he and you think he is, his “extraordinary naivetÁ©” nullifies whatever decency you ascribe to him.
TheBigHenry?
Just to be certain (cos I don’t wanna go off on you) you accusing me of “ascribing decency” to that crap?
With Hugo barely 40 hours into figuring out which billet circle he’s assigned to?
You “rar'” with me here Henry (admittedly I might be misunderstanding – but I takes no chances) I’ve got a friend DantÁ¨ who’ll rar’ with you too.
“I should have noted that America’s founding people — its indigenous population — has already been marginalized.”
The indigenous people were the founders of various tribes, not of America.
JK,
Since “extraordinary naivetÁ©” is a direct quote from Malcolm’s comment above, and my “I care not a fig” was obviously mocking one-eye, it should be clear that my remarks were addressing Malcolm’s overly generous, IMHO, defense of his friend’s insidious intentions.
But, in case it is still not clear, my opinion is that Obama and all the useful idiots who worship the ground he hovers over, are neither smart nor well-intentioned. They are smarmy ill-intentioned bastards.
P.S.: I should have prefaced my last sentence, above, with either one of Obama’s favorite perfidies: “Let me be perfectly clear” or “Make no mistake”. And, yes, I am mocking Obama.
Thank you Henry.
Thank you again cos I’m really tired. Thanks for not making fun of my learning disability, diarrlexia.
Thanks thrice you note.
JK,
In the couple of years or so that I have been reading your commentary here, I have come to know you as a big-hearted and often insightful man who, on occasion, is a bit difficult to understand (primarily because I am far from fluent in Arkansasian).
I know I am sometimes less blunt than usual. But be assured, in those cases it won’t be you who is the object of my contempt.
Peter, I tried to be nice. When I said you “meant well” I meant that you were following what you believe to be the Good.
You have, however, clearly expressed your wish that my own people have their homeland taken from them and their culture denigrated and displaced in the nation they founded — and to the extent that you support and propagate this view, I consider you the enemy.
Your comment is a farrago of falsehoods and inconsistencies with your previous remarks in these pages.
You deny having confidence in the continuing benevolence of government, yet in the past you have repeatedly ridiculed, in the context of gun rights, the idea that the government of the United States might ever turn on its people, and that the importance of the Second Amendment is to place sufficient power in the hands of the people to mount an effective resistance.
You refer unambiguously to Diversity as an unalloyed blessing, in apparent ignorance of the overwhelmingly sanguinary and persuasive evidence of history, ancient and modern, from all the corners of the Earth. A blessing? Tell that to the Tutsi and the Hutus, the Turks and the Armenians, the Albanians and the Serbs, the Sunni and the Shi’a, the Han and the Tibetans, the Chinese and the Malaysians, the Bloods and MS-13, the Tamils and the Sinhalese, the English and the Muslims (and the Jews and the Muslims, the Copts and the Muslims, the Hindus and the Muslims, etc…)…
Yet you have agreed, here, that a nation and homeland has the right to preserve and conserve its essential qualities, and that happiness is diminished when this right is violated.
Do you care, then, if the Tibetan people are extirpated from their Tibet? All around the world, native peoples are being displaced and trodden down in their homelands. The U.N., and bien- pensant liberals everywhere, seem to be in agreement that this is an abomination to be resisted. The unprincipled exception seems to be the white race, in its homelands of Europe and America. That you glibly sign on with this is, in my view, an act of naked aggression against my ethny and its magnificent culture — the race and culture, I’ll remind you, that invented the modern world — and, like an ever-swelling number of us, I won’t let it pass in silence any longer.
No, you say that as a traitor. We do not wish to rule “everything”. (If we did, we would.) We simply wish to have a homeland of our own, in the nation we created, where our culture is, and remains, the national culture.
Finally, you seem, with what is perhaps the clearest evidence of your utter incomprehension of what it means to learn from history, to think that that to appreciate the importance of history’s lessons is “to believe that the past was always better than the present, the future will ineluctably be worse than the present, or that change is always — or nearly always — a bad thing.”
Of all the straw men you have propped up in these threads, this is perhaps the flimsiest one to date. History is not normative. It merely provides an enormous repository of data: data about human nature, the law of unintended consequences, the efficacy of different forms of government, and in particular the wages of hubris and folly.
I wan’t go on any longer; I am recovering from oral surgery this evening, and am in considerable discomfort. I must leave any further remarks to our able commenters.
Maybe there’s not enough fiber in your diet.
Having a multi-ethnic country does not mean that your “homeland is being taken away from you.” It means that you share it with people of other ethnicities.
There is a huge difference between a less-than-benevolent government and a tyranny which requires armed resistance. It’s the difference between Paul Ryan’s vision of government and Stalin.
The notion that the US government will become a tyranny ex nihilo, which requires armed resistance by American citizens, is complete and utter paranoid nonsense.
Diversity has been an unalloyed blessing in the context of America, as is clear from what I wrote: “it is what made America great.” Hutus and Tutsis have nothing to do with it.
Comparing ethnic diversity in America to the extirpation of Tibetans is probably the silliest thing in your intemperate and hyperbolic post. Nor is anyone committing “an act of naked aggression against my ethny and its magnificent culture.” Nobody is denigrating or destroying Western culture. It’s like saying that Mozart was under attack when Miles Davis came along. Western culture — magnificent or otherwise — is alive and well. Turn on the television, go to the movies, or see a show and you’ll have as much of it as you want. The fact that other cultures are also present in America in no way diminishes native American culture, whatever that is.
The suggestion that white, Christian Americans are being “displaced and trodden down” is piteous self-victimization which is untethered to reality.
The American population is 72.4% white and 76% Christian. I do not know in which world a country which is overwhelmingly white and Christian — and whose political and corporate leadership is nearly all white and Christian — is a place where the dominant ethnic group is being extirpated.
You do have “a homeland of your own.” If the fact that you have to share it with others is such a concern, then your parents should not have come here from other countries in the first place, when their arrival presumably was also offensive to those who got here before them. We are a nation of immigrants, and no child of immigrants should begrudge others the right to join the American community.
Things are, in fact, much better than they have been. When we were growing up, segregation was rampant in the South, gays were harassed, and women had career choices ranging from librarian to school teacher. There was one phone company, three television networks, and the idea that computers (which then took up an entire room) would be used by the masses — and fit in your pocket – would have been considered absurd. We were in a cold war living under existential threat from Russia and China. Metrics like longevity, household wealth, and college graduation rates were nowhere near where they are now. By any reasonable measure, things are far better now than then, or pretty much any other time in American history.
I think you don’t understand what it is to be an American. The America you long for would not have allowed my grandparents to pass through Ellis Island or let Henry’s family come here as Holocaust survivors. It is intolerant, nativist, and short-sighted. It would have sent the Statue of Liberty back to France. It is not the America I live in, nor — thankfully — is it the America you live in.
I don’t presume to know which America anyone else longs for, but I certainly know, from first-person experience, which America I long for. And that is most definitely NOT the America that Leftist scoundrels like Obama are so eager to create via “fundamental transformation“.
The America I long for is the America that my parents and I immigrated to, legally of course, in 1949. That America was lead by President Truman, an American President I admire to this day and one who is generally acknowledged to be near-great in comparison to the great Washington and Lincoln.
I hasten to add, before I am attacked by simplistic straw-men arguments that Truman’s America had not yet eradicated polio and had not yet invented color TV, that I certainly don’t long for a time that did not include modern technological and medical advances. I long for the spirit of the American society in the days of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. That spirit was proud to acknowledge the true greatness of our Nation — one that fiercely protected its second-to-none meritocracy, acknowledged the need for improvement, and was generous to a fault toward less fortunate people and nations. It was an America that celebrated its Good and strove to limit its Bad, but NOT by “fundamental transformation”, which is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
There is no perfection in this world; there is always room for improvement. But the reasonable approach, one that strives to limit inevitable unintended consequences, is via incremental improvement. This time-honored approach is the same that has served our Nation’s Constitution so well for more than two centuries, during which time there have been, on average, fewer than one Amendment per decade (not counting the 10 that comprise the Bill of Rights, which was co-ratified with the main Document).
Well spoken [typed] Henry.
Thank you, JK.
Excellent comment, Henry.
Peter,
My fiber intake is sufficient, thank you. I do worry about your vision, though.
Have you heard the expression “rose-colored glasses”? Did you know that they are real, and that they exist to suppress the natural anxiety that chickens are prone to, when there is tension in the barnyard?
When domestic fowl are “cooped up” together, one of them may begin to peck another. The sight of blood then produces an anxious reaction in all the others, leading to a general outbreak of stress and disharmony. To prevent this, chickens are sometimes fitted with red-tinted lenses that prevent them from seeing the sanguinary reality of the social difficulties around them.
I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, because it’s clear enough that you already own a pair, and rarely take them off.
So: what is it that those ruddy spectacles prevent you from seeing? Among other things:
— The actual effect of increasing diversity in America, which is to increase strife and stress, to lower social cohesion and public trust, to engender ex nihilo a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted entirely to coping with the “challenges” that diversity creates, to lower the standard requirements for education and public service so as to avoid the “under-representation” of resentful groups, to crush and suppress the pleasant and entirely natural flow of shared traditions and folkways into the public square (because there necessarily are, as Diversity increases, fewer and fewer shared traditions), and to break a once-connate and generally harmonious nation into a fractious Babel of squabbling interest groups with little or nothing in common and a simmering resentment toward one another as they jostle for their places at the trough;
— The universal effect of high local diversity throughout history and around the world, which has been, almost without exception, to cause friction, faction, jealousy, and very often bloody civil war;
— The triumphalist gloating throughout the mainstream press over the impending minority status of white Americans, often accompanied by jeering taunts along the lines of “it’s not your country anymore”;
— That Americans, even white Americans, are nevertheless human beings, instantiating the same human nature and social instincts as any other human beings — and that therefore to mention the Tutsi and the Hutus, the Turks and the Armenians, the Albanians and the Serbs, the Sunni and the Shi’a, the Han and the Tibetans, the Chinese and the Malaysians, the Bloods and MS-13, the Tamils and the Sinhalese, and the Hindus and the Muslims as cautionary examples is simply to take note of the plain lessons of history;
— That elite college admissions strongly disfavor poor, white, Christian applicants, and that for applicants to belong to traditional American civil organizations such as 4-H or church groups reduces their chances even more;
— That there is an epidemic of black-on-white violent crime in this nation that goes largely unreported;
— That “denigration” of Western culture is the rule, not the exception, in America’s colleges and universities, with entire departments devoted to to the articulation of traditional Western civilization’s crimes and perfidies, and to the whipping up of grievances by various identity groups against those whom you describe as too “pale” and too “male”;
— That there is a critically important difference between legal immigration from Britain to its former colony (as in my own case), and the mass, often illegal, importation of utterly alien people and the subsequent glorification of their alienness — and that the cultural distance between an immigrant population and its host nation actually matters, as even you yourself acknowledged here;
— That the Statue of Liberty was given to the United States not to trumpet the infinite blessings of Diversity and uncontrolled borders, but rather to commemorate the philosophical virtues of Republican government upon the centennial of America’s liberation from the British monarchy.
A partial list, but it will have to do for now.
Turn on the television, you say, or go to the movies, to see that our “traditional” culture is alive and well. Shall we include, say, the Academy-Award-nominated “Django Unchained”? Or its star, gloating on America’s premier comedy venue that he “gets to kill all the white people”? Shall we include programs like “Hung”, a show built upon the premise that a man has a large penis, or the record-breaking popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, a lurid saga of sexual enslavement? Shall we consider how far our most august institutions have been debased when the First Lady of the United States, in a spectacle worthy of Caligula, co-opts both the dignity of both our nation’s highest office and the nation’s armed services to preen in Hollywood’s tawdry Saturnalia of self-congratulation?
As for “too pale”, which I find perhaps the most offensive of all your remarks: would anyone say the Tibetans are “too Tibetan” be the majority in Tibet? Or the Indians “too brown” for India? How can any people be “too” representative of the founding characteristics of their own nation to deserve to preserve that nation as their homeland?
As Henry points out, you stubbornly confuse mourning for America’s former character — its lost spirit of personal responsibility, modesty, Christian decency, acknowledgment of the natural differences between the sexes, and above all, cultural unity and commonality — with a wish to return to a former time, in which various technological (and yes, social) improvements had yet to take place. Your inability to see how much of incalculable value has been willfully rejected and discarded since the mid-20th century — and in particular, since the catastrophic decade of the 1960s — is not virtue, but blindness.
It’s those red glasses. How I wish I could get them off you for just a minute.
I could go on for quite a bit longer, but I’m still a little woozy from yesterday’s surgery, and this is enough. If readers would like to see in greater detail the extent of my friend Peter’s obduracy on the question of nationhood, immigration, and diversity, please take the time to read the long comment-thread on this year-old post.
Ditto, Malcolm.
This deserves a post of its own.
Legal immigration is not a right; it is a privilege. Illegal immigration is neither. It is a criminal violation. Begrudging anyone anything is, however, not legally proscribed. Hence, it is a right.
Have been away for a few days, so, thanks BigHenry for conveying the thoughts of many.
Yes, that was the acme of America’s greatness.
That virile, unified and unapologetically confident nation is utterly dead and gone — buried under the rubble of history, with a stake through its heart.
Went to school at Wm. Chrisman on W. Maple in Indep. Mo during the during the 50’s, just half a block from Truman’s home. When weather was agreeable, the art teacher would have us do chalk sketchings of the home and surrounding wrought iron fencing.
That is very gratifying to hear, Up2L8. Those were the days when “Proud to be an American” was “politically correct”. But now the former term is anathema to the Left, and the latter term is an abomination to the rest of us.
One more point I neglected to address:
In the era lately mentioned — the Truman-Eisenhower epoch — the United States was 90% white. That’s a 20% decline in a single lifetime — an extraordinarily rapid rate of change — and, as we are reminded often by a smirking media commentariat, before long white people will no longer be a majority at all.
White people are expected to view this as a positive development, or at worst to accept it with indifference. All this while every other imaginable identity group is happily encouraged to “celebrate” its shared traits, to stick together as a group, and to defend its interests both socially and politically.
Enough is enough.
Perhaps the Voting Acts legislation will be overturned. It’s “purpose & effect” for some years removed.
I ought probably expand (before Peter returns from church)
As I understand the “purpose” of the legislation – it was intended to clear the way for aggrieved minorities to vote. Recently most people (including probably, some of their dead relatives) have been unhindered for the most part, and have done just that – vote.
The “effect” – a black fellow is in the White House and California serially elects Maxine Waters.