"Deconstructionist sleight of hand"

Bookworm continues to educate us about fascism, with a post at American Interest. She even provides a nifty graph:

Given that conservative Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

...Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

Without exception, two bad things happen in totalitarian governments: (1) the government ceases to see it citizens as individuals and views them only as widgets who exist to aggrandize the state; and (2) the people who control statist governments fall prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin went after their own people. Hitler got the negative headlines only because he explosively sought control over Europe, without anticipating Churchill’s refusal to surrender or America’s ferocity when roused. Had Hitler been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in China), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have lasted for decades more.

After the war, Hitler’s grandiosity ensured that “fascism” was a dirty word. American communists needed to move fast to erase Russia’s pact with Hitler and to disguise that “fascism” and “communism” are variations on a theme. Using America’s media and higher education systems, America’s communists associated the word “fascist” with “right wing.” This allowed them to affix the “fascist” label to those who cherish individual liberty, tying them to Hitler, the ultimate madman. It didn’t matter that the new label was deconstructionist sleight of hand. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

...One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

Read more here.

"...if Donald Trump decides he has to schmooze Al Gore before giving me Scott Pruitt, I can live with that."

I am glad to see one-by-one writers at National Review coming around to praise the actions of President-elect Trump. For example, Andrew McCarthy:

Well, if there had been a second Clinton administration, do you think we’d have gotten Pruitt? How about Jeff Sessions at Justice, or General James Mattis at Defense? Or Trump’s promised upgrade in immigration enforcement to be carried out by General John Kelly, the clear-eyed So-Com commander who has warned about radical Islam’s inroads in Central and South America (and a Gold Star dad whose son laid down his life in Afghanistan, fighting our jihadist enemies)?

Do you figure Hillary would have tapped teachers-union scourge Betsy DeVos for the Education Department? Or a staunch Obamacare critic such as congressman (and doctor) Tom Price to run HHS? Do you think a President Clinton would have stocked her national-security team with advisers who believe we need to organize policy around the idea that the jihadist regime in Iran is an enemy of the United States — not a potential ally we should appease at all costs, but a foe whose ambitions and provocations need to be checked?

Not a chance.

Trump’s call with the president of Taiwan? I like it. After all, to pull off the “strategic ambiguity” of our dubious “One China” policy, needn’t we at least maintain some, you know, ambiguity? And in a week when we observed the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I must say Trump’s echoes of Reagan and MacArthur — declaring, “There can be no substitute for victory in the pursuit of peace” — were far more welcome than a lecture on the perils of “fake news” from, of all people, the woman who fraudulently blamed a YouTube video for the murder of four Americans by jihadists in Benghazi.

...On that score, I am not as glum as some of my friends over Trump’s Carrier intervention. As a matter of policy, I think our editorial has it right. Thus, I can’t praise it because I am not convinced, as Moore is, that it “puts American workers first.” When the government dabbles in this sort of thing, some American workers always benefit over others.

It succeeds as theater, however, because the visibly affected workers are the ones whose jobs have been saved. And in politics, theater has its place. Since the economic effect of the Carrier bailout is negligible, is this one of those places? That depends. Let’s say Trump did it merely to showcase his emphasis of American well-being over global concerns, before implementing economic policies that benefit American workers across the board once he takes office. If so, Carrier will be remembered as a clever gambit that won Trump some goodwill. On the other hand, if Carrier is a prelude to Obama-style crony capitalism — just substitute Trump’s manufacturing rationalization for Obama’s green one — then it will rightly be seen as the seed of a debacle.

Time will tell. As it will regarding Trump’s olive branches to the left — the praise for Obama, the let-felonies-be-bygones approach to Hillary, the audience with Gore, the bridge-building with the New York Times editorial board, the phone call to Al Sharpton, and so on. It is said that Trump is not ideological and wants to overcome our country’s deep, paralyzing divisions. That’s an appropriate thing for a president to try to do, and maybe Trump’s combative persona can make some ironic headway. The Left knows that, unlike the gentlemanly George W. Bush, the new president will punch back and then some. Maybe he’ll get better cooperation — or at least less sabotage.

We’ll see. I am pleasantly enough surprised that I am not fretting, for now, over Ivanka’s visions of Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a long way to go, but if Donald Trump decides he has to schmooze Al Gore before giving me Scott Pruitt, I can live with that.

Read more here.

Who is more likely to be a fascist, Hillary or Trump?

Bookworm leads a discussion on how the essence of fascism and communism is statism.

...So now that you’ve gotten a handle on the only two types of government that actually exist — more state control or less state control — let’s zero in on “fascism.” It started in Italy, so a good beginning is Mussolini’s classic description of fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Boom! Statism writ large.

Except that, if it’s statism writ large, why did the communists, who are obviously statists, hate it? Progressive/Democrat academia and politicians say that this hatred arose because communism is a warm, cuddly, sharing kind of statism, while fascism is a mean, nasty, right-wing Republican kind of statism. Not even close and definitely no cigar.

Both communism and fascism are statist belief systems that reject individual liberties. American conservatives (many of whom identify with the Republican party), being all about the Bill of Rights, small government, and individual liberty, aren’t playing in the communist and fascist sandbox. Heck, they’re not even in the same playground.

Communism, the “purest” form of socialism, says that there should be no private ownership. Everything should be owned by the people for the benefit of the people.

...If you dig just a little way down into the Trump agenda, you find out that when he talks about “making America great again” he’s mostly talking about enforcing laws and policies already on the books. Was Clinton a fascist when he signed into effect some of those laws? Is the history of America right up until Obama fascist because we actually had laws, most of which Obama ignores? The answers, naturally, are no. There’s nothing fascist about enforcing our immigration laws, our national security laws, and our criminal laws, or about elevating the constitution as the primary document from which American law flows. We’re not charting new territory here. We’re returning America to its natural mostly-free state.

Doesn’t that sound all nice and equal? It’s not. The only way to achieve “everything owned by the people for the benefit of the people” is to place ownership in the government as the people’s representatives. However, once you’ve placed everything in government hands, you’ve created a government class.

Government classes with total power are scary. Everything that is bad in individuals — greed, carelessness, stupidity, corruption, nepotism, bullying — is magnified beyond all imagination when it’s concentrated in a single all-powerful government.

...concentrating power in government, contrary to people’s expectations, never leads to a golden age of wealth, morals, and generosity. Instead, it invariably leads to economic and moral collapse, as we’ve seen in Europe, and too often leads to despotism (e.g., Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, and on and on).

Okay, that’s communism. But what about fascism? It’s communism’s opposite, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Just as with communism, fascism is predicated on complete state control. To repeat Mussolini, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” The difference is that the state does not nationalize industry. Instead, it leaves ownership in private hands, while vesting control in the state. Fascism gives the illusion of capitalism because individuals still “own” and “run” the companies, but in fact, the government and these individuals are in cahoots for both control and profit. What’s missing entirely is a free market. It’s all in the state and for the state.

For ordinary citizens, the difference between communism and fascism is like the difference between wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs with some sparkly rhinestones. The citizens are still wearing handcuffs because the state is still calling the shots. It’s just that in the fascist state, at least before the state really gets the bit in its teeth, there’s an illusion that things are nicer.

In other words, communism and fascism are just different flavors of statism. Moreover, when they’re not fighting for power, they’re inclined to support each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin, right up until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory too. Likewise, in Spain, there was a civil war not because communism and fascism are natural enemies, but because they were jealous rivals both seeking the throne.

Given all this, how did American conservatives, the people who oppose statism and believe in individual liberty, end up being tarred constantly as fascists? Well, look to the Leftist takeover of Hollywood, academia, and media.

After World War II, the American Left needed to elevate communism’s s status and, Leftists hoped, give the Soviet Union the upper hand in the Cold War. What better way to do that than to attach to conservatives, those who cherish individual liberty, the “fascist” label, a label closely associated with Hitler, the ultimate madman? It didn’t matter that the label was completely inapposite. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

Trump is also promising to get the government out of American businesses, another policy that is the opposite of fascism. Remember, fascism is all about a government/industry partnership to further state control. It’s communism with cash. So Trump’s promise to decrease regulations and lower taxes to weaken government’s ability to interfere with private citizens is a step towards freedom, rather than its opposite.

Another Trump promise is to respect the Second Amendment, keeping guns in the hands of private citizens. Remember: The single biggest barrier to total state control is an armed citizenry.

...Even if Trump isn’t a despot in the making, are his supporters fanatics who would like him to be a despot? Doubtful. I think what most Trump supporters hope Trump means when he talks about “fixing things,” is that he’ll take our sclerotic government and say “You’re fired” to corrupt, redundant, useless, or lazy bureaucrats who suck at the government teat but provide no benefit for America’s citizens. What we imagine him doing is taking broken institutions and either destroying them (bye-bye, abusive EPA), cleaning house (IRS, you’re next), or returning them to their original mission (the military is not a social justice experiment). GOP politicians, despite their invariable promises to “clean up” government, seem incapable of making the tough calls necessary to purge or fix what’s broken in the existing system. Trump’s history and rhetoric make it seem possible that he’s finally the one with the courage to make those hard choices and tame the federal beast.

Go here to read why Bookworm believes it is Hillary, rather than Trump, who is the likely fascist.

Weakness to be exploited, rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated: the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Town Hall about Obama's efforts to appease Islamists.

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism."

...The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.

...Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger -- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.
Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.

In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.
More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.

In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.

Read more here.

What's behind Obama's transgender push?

Bookworm Room takes a look at what might be behind the push toward "transgender rights."

...Frank Marshall Davis, a radical Leftist who was Obama’s surrogate father and mentor during his childhood years in Hawaii, fully supported this politically-driven hyper-sexualization, including sex with children. He engaged in and wrote about disturbing sexual practices such as bondage, simulated rape, undinism, and pedophilia (or, at the very least, pederasty). Since Obama’s political ascendancy, both his poetic forays and his peculiar disassociative behavior have supported speculation that Davis, giving free rein to his personal preferences and his commitment to preventing the child from gaining ownership of his own body, may have practiced what he preached on the fatherless young boy given so unthinkingly into his care.

While the overheated Marxist rhetoric of the 1960s has died away, the Leftist preoccupation with childhood sexuality, and its relentless desire to have the state control a child’s sexual development — and, by extension, to deny the child self-ownership — is still alive and well. The primary pathway the Left currently uses to decouple childhood sexual development from self-individuation is the gay rights agenda.

...Subconsciously, we recognize that these pro-homosexual programs have nothing to do with teaching tolerance, which is a virtue in a pluralistic society. Instead, the programs have everything to do with having the state substitute its goal of sexual, and therefore social, control in place of a parent’s desire to inculcate his children with traditional Judeo-Christian values, values that focus on the inviolability of the individual, beginning with his body.

Examples abound of supposedly anti-discriminatory programs that, instead of focusing on tolerance, work to direct a child’s sexual development away from the zone of privacy that is a hallmark of Western sexuality. Robin of Berkeley describes a group called “Gender Spectrum,” which has the ostensible goal of allowing “transgender, gender bending, [and] gender nonconforming” children and teens to hang with each other and share their experiences. She rightly sees this not as an effort to promote tolerance, but as a way to make it “cool to dabble in polyamory and gender nonconformism,” thereby “destroy[ing] the West by degrading traditional values.”

The relentless Leftist obsession with homosexuality and variations on traditional sexual gender roles is deeply embedded in the Obama administration. Last year, a vigilant blogger exposed the fact that Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” as part of his leadership role in the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (“GLSEN”), aggressively promoted child pornography in the classroom. GLSEN’s actions had nothing to do with creating a safe, non-discriminatory environment for young people with different sexual orientations and everything to do with using the government (i.e., public schools) to inculcate in children the notion that their bodies have no boundaries. A body with no boundaries, of course, is a body that can easily be decoupled from the individual’s control and then ceded to the state.

So if you’re getting an itchy feeling between your shoulder blades when you contemplate your child’s hyper-sexualized reading list and gender-bending sex education curriculum, you need not fear that you have turned into a repressed, homophobic Victorian. Instead, there’s an excellent chance that you are someone with a deep respect for individual freedom who resents the Leftists’ efforts to co-opt your child’s body as a necessary sacrifice to the State.

Read more here.

Black Lives Matter and much more

Jonah Goldberg notices that Bill Clinton got upset at some Black Lives Matter protesters the other day. Jonah's thoughts on Black Lives Matter:

The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

Jonah further notes about Bill and Hillary,

One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Besides these comments, Jonah has many insightful things to say about such diverse topics as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, progressivism, Richard Nixon, classical liberalism, statism, and much more here.

Scare them!

Sarah Hoyt writes,

The only way to return freedom to the people is to break the mental chains holding them. This involves breaking the back of the media-entertainment complex.

We’re not there yet. We might not be there for the rest of our lives. The process takes time.

However, it has begun. And even in its beginning, its scaring the living daylights out of the statists, the state-worshippers, the enemies of freedom.

It is our duty as free men and women, to continue scaring them. It is our duty to scare them as much as possible, and to free as many people as possible from their rotten doublethink.

Why do people fail? Why do they succeed?

Daniel Greenfield writes that

the support of the state isn’t enough for individuals or for businesses. Obama lavishly doled out government money to Green Energy companies only to see them fail. With corporate welfare, as with social welfare, the need for government money is a reliable predictor of failure.

Those who cannot succeed on their own, will not succeed through the government.

There is an entire academic industry dedicated to turning out proofs of racism to explain failure and yet there are indisputable studies out there documenting things such as the diminished grade levels and higher crime rates for students from single parent homes on a worldwide scale.

While the left pushes harder for its post-family world of powerful institutions, there are reams of data showing how destructive trading the family for the state is. And there is no group of people that embodies that better than African-Americans whose lives have been taken over by the state.

A basic difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans is that the former are most likely to be married and the latter are least likely to be married. That may be why Asian students succeed in the same “bad” urban schools that are supposedly failing the other minority students.

We are more than the sum of our institutions, we are our parents and our grandparents, we are the things we read and the things we believe, we are the sense of mission that brought our ancestors through thousands of years of trouble and we are their strengths and their weaknesses.

It’s not institutions that make our successes possible. It is our beliefs that make all the difference.

How best to aid the conservative cause?

George Will writes that conservatives have believed that the way to persuade unbelievers in the conservative message would be to have them read some well written text written by a conservative. However, Will writes that what conservatives have learned is that the best way to persuade people is for progressives to be elected, and then people can see the bankruptcy of the progressives' policies.

Will writes,

Counterfactual history can illuminate the present, so: Suppose in 2012, Barack Obama had told the truth about the ability of people to keep their health plans. Would he have been reelected? Unlikely. Suppose in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts, instead of rewriting the health-care law to save it, had been the fifth vote for overturning it. Would Obama be better off today? Probably.

Will wonders if history will repeat itself and progressives and statists will be rebuked by voters for many years into the future. Let's hope so.

President cool?

Here is worshipful tribute to President Obama in, where else but The New York Times. Why did I read it? Because someone I admire, Scott Ott, recommended it. Scott writes on his Facebook page,

This is how the Left sells statism. Don't whine about it. Study it. Don't reject it as irrational, learn to use it to uphold what is good, just and rational.