Category — Elitism

“Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.”-Robert Heinlein

If you think this election will resolve the differences in this country, I doubt it. Since the 2000 election, positions have hardened; in 2004 the hubbub be came roars. The volume is only rising.

After ACORN rigged mortgages for illegals, then registered them to vote including the Dallas Cowboy Football team in Nevada, I’m not confident this election is going to be an “OH Well” on the 5^th of Nov.

The congressional GOP sold their honor for pottage. They’re toast.

[snip]
However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, “The Diebold machines were hacked!” The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the “dumb hicks” in flyover country overruled that of their “betters”. And we will hear the cries of, “Racism! Racism!” ad nauseam.

I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I’m wrong about that. I guess we’ll see.

This started with the spoiled kids of the ’50’s whose parents didn’t want them to suffer the pain of the depression and post depression life.

And of course, as David Frum has written, the sixties were really the vanguard, the early warning detector of the looming culture war, which rages–if a “cold civil war” can be said to rage–to this day.

Guess what brats, welcome to 2008 and the great meltdown.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.-Robert Heinlein

Have you ever felt like THIS in the company of Progressives?* Enlarge the image.  You’re the conservative guy in the red leotard undergoing the liberals’ trepanning of your skull.  A tin-smith, trust fund grad of Middlebury is doing the nasty work.  He’s watched by a squishy, activist, humanist cleric and a bookhead - a journalist or an academic, no doubt. 

They’re looking for evidence of learning and native intelligence.   They assume you have neither, but they can’t resist the investigation or the effort to test you with esoteric compost.  They use expressions like “existential threat” incorrectly, like Mudslide Face, Charley Gibson in his interview with Sarah Palin. 

He thinks his weighty usage somehow describes Israel’s “right to exist”, and is entirely clueless that he’s wrong, that he’s dispensing jargon.  To modify an old insult, a journalist like Gibson is an intellectual in the same way that a mechanical rabbit is a quarry.  You can catch him, but what’s the use?  With bozos like Gibson, it’s “I Verbalize, Therefore I Am”, and liberals everywhere agree. He won’t get this treatment from The Boston Globe.  The Left doesn’t indulge in this kind of self-analysis. 

Liberalism today is a silly union of elite leftist ideas absorbed in ”higher education” with the old populist issues revealed in the fields and on the shop floor.  But that doesn’t explain the epidemic of smugness and snoot on the left.  Nothing in Progressivism automatically turns its adherents into diletantes, poseurs or colorful, but small-brained song birds.   That comes from something else.  Egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism undermines every pecking order.  Distinctions are impossible; maybe even sinful.  When pent-up liberal vanity is discouraged in terms of ownership or income or any of the other ways people express distinctions, it then leaks out in information-as-knowledge, and the chronic competition of my brain against your brain, and my fact against your fact.   Ridiculous.  They have no other outlet for their conviction that they compose a meritocratic ruling class, and it’s driving them crazy. 

  * “The Cure of Folly (Extraction of the Madness Stone)”  - Hieronymous Bosch

Visiting our families in Pennsylvania brought home just how little Barack Obama knows about small towns. They’re not bitter impoverished people clinging to racism, religion, and guns for solace. It’s not a place that can be dismissively referred to as “fly over” country like many liberal elites do.

It is populated by patriotic, God fearing people who love their families and neighbors. This was perfectly illustrated today by a local town. It held a chicken dinner for a cancer victim. A good old fashioned neighbor helping neighbor event that sold out in less than an hour. There aren’t any Whole Foods selling arugula to make an out of touch elite like Barack Obama happy, but it’s a place to love and respect none the less.

Paul wasn’t struck this hard

The light of conversion, brighter than that seen by Paul, altered Hillary’s belief in church going and guns. The stump Gospel according to Hillary now proclaims “how positive and ‘fundamentally optimistic’” we are.
Shorn of her elitism like a prostitute’s hair, Hillary castigated Obama’s remarks about bumpkins. Her new view posits that bumpkins are good people, stupid but good.

“I disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in our country cling to guns and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.
She described herself as a pro-gun churchgoer, recalling that her father taught her how to shoot a gun when she was a young girl and said that her faith “is the faith of my parents and my grandparents.”

This alleged conversion took place before the corkscrew landing in Bosnia but after she tried to join the Marines.
God works in mysterious ways. From the Obamessiah to Clinton’s vision, religion is returning to American politics.

Can I get an Amen!

     ….Trouble Ahead for Conservatism…Jeffrey Hart takes a shot…

Jeffrey Hart is a  Senior Editor for William Buckley’s National Review.  Hart began his career at the magazine in 1962 as a book reviewer, and joined the editorial staff in 1969.   Hart wrote an essay, entitled “Right at the End”,  for the March issue of The American Conservative, a quirky, furiously anti-Bush,  paleoconservative/libertarian magazine. 

Hart describes the contentious and rough beginnings of National Review. He adds remembrances of his personal association with William Buckley, and describes Buckley’s hardening anti-Iraq War views, which matured into a two-part opinion that (a) if Bush had been a parliamentary leader, he, Bush would have to resign, and (b) that Conservatives who have defended Bush on the war have effectively killed the conservative movement built over the years by Buckley himself.

Hart had this to say about Rush Limbaugh:

Although Buckley famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 members of the Harvard faculty, he was no populist.

But to have influence, direct influence of the kind Buckley wanted, he would have to associate to some extent with quite a few popular yahoos.  I recall at one of Buckley’s Monday night dinners for National Review senior editors, a sort of salon, seeing Rush Limbaugh enter the room and squeeze his considerable bulk into one of Pat Buckley’s [Buckley’s wife] fragile-looking 18th century French chairs.  Would he reduce this antique to splinters?  What Pat would have done if Limbaugh collapsed the thing boggles the mind.  Revolt against the masses [a proposed book title for Buckley]?  Limbaugh was the masses.  To have influence, to be a player in practical politics, Buckley would have to deal with the likes of Limbaugh, a radio blowhard, a type that has proliferated in the conservative movement.

Ramesh Ponuuru of National Review’s The Corner softpedals Hart’s comments HERE…

Hart has fired one of the first of many shots to come, at the kind of conservatism formulated by electronic media celebrities like Limbaugh.  But to digress, I was a fan of Buckley’s for forty years. But by the end of his life, I tired of the mannerisms, tired of the relentless elitism in his memoirs, the sailing adventures, the fine wines and tales of his great companions like John Kenneth Galbraith and Mario Cuomo.  Good taste spoils pretty quickly if it isn’t kept chilled and in the dark.     

But Buckley did, indeed, make conservatism respectable. He scraped off the taint of Southern Democrat ”conservatism”  and John Birch Society weirdness.  Along with the rebellious, eccentric intellectuals he gathered around him at National Review, he advanced a formal and valid philosopy about what it means to be free and human, and opposed to the slave chains of ideology and the dictats of the administrative state. 

In contrast, the ideas promoted on the radio seem, to me, to be a permanent complaint about a certain type of petulant, effete, epicene liberal personality and the ideas they emit, leavened occasionally with some fragments of superficial conservative thinking.   This isn’t a coherent conservatism, it’s a weeping social fissure, a class war, that can’t be mediated by democracy.  It’s a justifiable reaction to years and years of progressive deconstruction of American society.  That much is true.  But it’s a declaration of war rather than a declaration of ideas.

The coming battle among conservatives, now that the restraining influence of Buckley is gone, is going to be between the polemicists/pamphleteers and the intellectuals.   It won’t be pretty.

Dr. Lawrence Britt is a Secular Humanist which explains his reluctance to include any of the Marxist/Communist/Progressive governments engaged in heinous conventions. There cannot be any argument that all Islam incorporates this definition; they define the term. Additionally, he says nothing about Woodrow Wilson or the biggest fascist in this hemisphere, FDR.

Ah yes, he incarcerated (interned) about 120,000 Japanese, 62% (74,400) were American citizens. Furthermore, in the early ‘30’s FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court to overrun the Constitutional dictum on the Separation of Powers. All to get his socialist New Deal policies operating.

I ask that the reader look at the actions of the Soviet Union with the following in mind. Examine China too, along with Cuba, Venezuela.

The U.S. Congress of today regarding the disparagement of the wealthy and ideas about corporate “patriotism” a la Obama attain the true bill describing Fascism.

One finds that all countries may flirt with fascism at times. Those that have a strong constitution and follow that will step back. The shredding the document by redefining it as one “needs” removes the restraining chains, giving freedom to the slippage. Today’s Congress, particularly the House, exhibits many symptoms.

General characteristics of a Fascist Country

1. Fascism is commonly defined as an open terror-based dictatorship which is:

• Reactionary: makes policy based upon current circumstances rather than creating policies to prevent problems; piles lies and misnomers on top of more lies until the truth becomes indistinguishable, revised or forgotten.
• Chauvinistic: Two or more tiered legal systems, varying rights based upon superficial characteristics such as race, creed and origin.
• Imperialistelements of finance capital: Extending a nation’s authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political domination of one state over its allies.

Though a dictatorship is the most common association with fascism, a democracy or republic can also be fascist when it strays away from its Tenets of sovereignty. In the 20th Century, many Fascist countries started out as republics. Through the use of fear, societies gave up their rights under the guise of security. Ultimately these republics morphed into Fascist states.

2. Fascism is an extreme measure taken by the middle classes to forestall lower-working class revolution; it thrives on the weakness of the middle classes. It accomplishes this by embracing the middle-class’ love of the status-quo, its complacency and its fears of:

1. Generating a united struggle within the working class
2. Revolution
3. Losing its own power and position within society

In a more simplistic term the people currently in control fear that if they allow equal rights and equal consideration to those being oppressed, they will become oppressed and lose everything. Generally those in power are of a smaller segment of society, but they hold the wealth and control of key systems like manufacturing, law, finance and government position, [snip]

In reality it is the oppressors’ fear of retribution by the oppressed that perpetuates fascism; for justification they dehumanize, demonize, strip them of rights, add new laws, restrict movement and attempt to control them by whatever means possible to prevent an uprising. It is very common in a fascist system to have the oppressed referred to as sub-human, animals, terrorists, savages, barbarians, vermin or any other term designed to create justification for the acts of terror and fascism perpetrated on the oppressed. [snip]

Propaganda also empowers the oppressors with elitism racially, socially, intellectually and/or spiritually.

The 7 conditions (Warning signs)that foster & fuel fascism are:

Instability of capitalist relationships or markets
The existence of considerable declassed social elements
The stripping of rights and wealth focused upon a specific segment of the population, specifically the middle class and intellectuals within urban areas as this the group with the means, intelligence and ability to stop fascism if given the opportunity.
Discontent among the rural lower middle class (clerks, secretaries, white collar labor). Consistent discontent among the general middle and lower middle classes against the oppressing upper-classes (haves vs have-nots).
Hate: Pronounced, perpetuated and accepted public disdain of a specific group defined by race, origin, theology or association.
Greed: The motivator of fascism, which is generally associated with land, space or scarce resources in the possession of those being oppressed.
Organized Propaganda:

a) The creation of social mythology that venerates (creates saints of) one element of society while concurrently vilifying (dehumanizing) another element of the population through misinformation, misdirection and the obscuring of factual matter through removal, destruction or social humiliation, (name-calling, false accusations, belittling and threats).

b) The squelching of public debate not agreeing with the popular agenda via slander, libel, threats, theft, destruction, historical revisionism and social humiliation. Journalists in particular are terrorized if they attempt to publish stories contrary to the agenda.

3. Fascism dovetails business & government sectors into a single economic unit, while concurrently increasing in-fighting and distrust between the units fostering advancement towards war.

4.

• Fascism promotes chauvinist demagogy, (appealing to the prejudices and emotions of the populace) by fostering selective persecution and accepted public vilification of the target group. It then promotes this a “patriotic”, “supportive” or “the party line” and disagreement with such as “anti-government”, “anti-faith” or “anti-nation”.
• Fascismcreates confusion through “facts”. It relies on junk science, revisionism, the elimination of cultural records/treasures and obfuscations to create its case and gain acceptance. Fascism can also combine Marxist critiques of capitalism or faith based critics of the same to re-define middle class perceptions of democracy and to force its issues, confuse logic and create majority consensus between targeted groups. This is also referred to as creating a state of Cognitive Dissonance, the mental state human beings are most easily manipulated.

5. Both middle and upper-middle-class dictated democracy and fascism are class dictatorships that use organized violence (verbal or physical) to maintain the class rule of the oppressors over the oppressed.

The difference between the two is demonstrated by the policies towards non-lower-working class classes. Fascism attains power through the substitution of one state’s form of class domination with another form, generally a middle class based republic segues into an open terrorist dictatorship, run by a few elite.

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism

by Dr. Lawrence Britt

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14-defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -
   Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -
   Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -
   The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military -
   Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism -
   The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media -
   Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security -
   Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -
   Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected -
   The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed -
    Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -
    Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -
    Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -
    Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections -
    Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

From a NY Daily News column on Howard Dean becoming the leader of the DNC:

The Democratic Party died yesterday after a long, painful lack of direction. Born in 1792, it was the second-oldest political party in the world, after the Tories of Great Britain. But it suffered decline for years and finally succumbed to complications brought on by elitism and anger. The cause of death was officially attributed to an obstruction lodged in its leadership.