De Tocqueville, born 225 years ago (he was about the same age as the nation) predicted it. The Constitution, born the year before he was, was supposed to prevent it, but I guess the Constitution is for the little people, not the ones running the country.
Category Archives: History
Socialism Always Ends Up The Same Way
Thoughts on the Venezuela meltdown, corporatism, and fascism:
I don’t think Obama wants a brutal tyranny any more than Hillary Clinton does (which is to say I don’t think he wants anything of the sort). But I do think they honestly believe that progress is best served if everyone falls in line with a national agenda, a unifying purpose, a “village” mentality expanded to include all of society. That sentiment drips from almost every liberal exhortation about everything from global warming to national service. But to point it out earns you the label of crank. As I said a minute ago about that “We’re All Fascists Now” chapter, I think people fail to understand that tyrannies — including soft, Huxleyan tyrannies — aren’t born from criminal conspiracies by evil men; they’re born by progressive groupthink.
Yes. It’s all well intentioned in their minds, never understanding the paving stones on the road to perdition. Of course, Hitler was well intentioned, too. He just wanted to get a little lebensraum, and purify the race.
I should note that it’s not just Democrats. The problem with Republicans is that (per the Chamber of Commerce), they’re pro-business. They’re not pro-market.
Bernie, On The Border
Heh: “So it’s okay to have socialism, but it can’t be international socialism, it has to be socialism in one nation. A sort of national socialism, I guess.”
Someone should write a book about that.
The Left
…embraces the logic of fascism.
No surprise to anyone familiar with the history, since fascism is leftism.
The Coming Democrat Implosion
Kurt Schlichter agrees with me that the Dems should be more worried about another 1968 than the Republicans should be about a repeat of 1992. I disagree with this, though:
Back in 1968, the Democrat Party was divided between liberals who loved America and
liberalsleftists who hated everything about it. The situation is a little different now, with today’s Democrat Party divided betweenliberalsleftists who hate everything about America andliberalsleftists who really, really hate everything about it.
Fixed it for him.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is a nice summary:
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year normal Americans saw the Democrats for what they were, and that’s the danger for them in 2016 too – that normal Americans will be reminded about what a circus of welfare-chiseling, race-obsessed, work-averse, baby-shredding freaks the Democrat party is.
I hope so.
Planned Parenthood’s Ugly History
Over at PJMedia, I point out that we shouldn’t be at all surprised about the organization’s callous inhumanity.
Bernie Sanders
National Socialist. With bonus racism. Of course, national socialism has a long and dishonorable history on the Left.
Also of course, Matthew Yglesias beclowns himself over it.
Evoloterra
Today is the 46th anniversary of the first human visit to the surface of our moon. There is a ceremony that can be downloaded to commemorate it here, and two of the authors (I and Bill Simon) will be discussing it on The Space Show this afternoon at 5-6:30 Eastern, 2-3:30 Pacific.
Back To LA
Conference is over, heading back to what I hope is still a rainy Los Angeles.
Remember, Monday is Evoloterra day, and I’ll be on The Space Show that afternoon to discuss it.
Grace And Dignity After Charleston
Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:
There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.
How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?
The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”
If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?
A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly 4 in 10 blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?
Bigotry against white Christian southerners isn’t just the only acceptable one; it’s almost mandatory. And it largely comes from people who embrace and vote for the historical and traditional (and current) party of racism.