RedStateEclectic

We Are All Communists Now

In Stephen KIng's 1980 novel, Firestarter, the book ended with the heroine going into the counter-culture offices of Rolling Stone magazine to tell her story of government gone mad to reporters who would presumably be brave and uncorrupt enough to publish the story.  In the 1984 film version, the offices were those of The New York Times. 

These days, Stephen King is a loud member of the privileged socialist caste we call Democrats, and would therefore undoubtedly not change the ending one whit if writing the book today.  However, if I were writing such an ending, I'd take Edward Snowden's lead and Glenn Greenwald's Intercept would be the plot device of choice.

Here's Greenwald's latest aggressive takedown of the Washington Post's "Fake News" list and the anonymous people who published it. It's brutally wonderful and spot-on accurate.  Titled Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group, he simultaneously ridicules and shames the reporter and editors who cite shady anonymous sources while calling for a government investigation into other journalists they're accusing of spreading Russian propaganda.

The article by reporter Craig Timberg – headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” – cites a report by a new, anonymous website calling itself “PropOrNot,”which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”

The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute.

So according the Washington Post, Ron Paul and Justin Raimondo are Russian propagandists. As is David Stockman, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.

Yes, it's that bizarre.

Truth be told, I find the whole political environment scenario to be quite beyond bizarre at the moment, and that's not even including the fact that we as a nation elected Donald freaking Trump as president. Here's what I mean:  10 years ago, the liberals mocked Romney's anti-Russia position with snarky comments like "The 80's called. They want their foreign policy back!" while Barack Obama promised he was going to hit the reset button on the US/Russia relationship. Heck, some say he won the election with talk like that.  

But once elected, he apparently decided he preferred to stay within his community organizer comfort zone and essentially turned foreign policy over to Hillary Clinton's State Department. Fast forward to Syria, suddenly we're at loggerheads with Russia again, and the left-leaning Democrats are simultaneously accusing the far left Russian government of tampering with our elections and the right wing Republicans of being in bed with those filthy Communists. 

Wait - what?

There is a propaganda technique called the Big Lie, which is usually stated along the lines of, "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth."  Saul Alinsky is attributed with telling people to repeatedly accuse enemies of doing what they oppose, while doing that very thing.   That seems to be what this is - a chess move in the game of psychological warfare.  Conspiracies involving fake news and Russian propaganda is a way  liberals who were blind-sided by the election results can explain away their stunning electoral losses.  Calling Donald Trump and his supporters deplorable Nazis during the election cycle didn't stop him, so now they're faced with either believing that the majority of their countrymen are in fact Nazi supporters, or they need to explain the election win another way.  Blaming Russia is a tool the leaders of their movement can use to drum up more hate and division without admitting that perhaps the core of their very philosophy is unpalatable to the masses.

I mean, everybody hates the Communists, right?

**************

If you like Glenn Greenwald, you might like to follow me on Twitter.  

 

 

 

Related articles

Scarce Justice - When What Is "Just" Is Not Known

The Miracle of Freedom

Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter: Drudge Report - Last of Old-Line Guerilla Fighters Was Fidel Castro (Trumpism Represents Capitalist Version)

Libertarian Presidential Debate - Johnson, McAfee, Petersen

Image credit.

Watch the first part:

 

My score card accords the winner of each segment 3 points, the runner up 2 points, the third-place-finisher 1 point - with cumulative points behind candidates' names:

I do not necessarily agree with the candidates' views, so my judgement is a mixture of assessing reasonableness (even in a person of different opinions), coherence, communicative effectiveness, and, where applicable, concurrence.

 

Introduction                            : McAfee (3), Petersen (2), Johnson (1)

Terror., Military, Foreign Policy  : Petersen (5), McAfee (5), Johnson (2)

When to go to war?                  : Johnson (5), Petersen (7), McAfee (6)

Dealing with Welfare State         : Johnson (8), Petersen (9), McAfee (7)

Terrorism, ISIS                         : Johnson (11), Petersen (11), McAfee (8)

Foreign aid                              : Johnson (14), Petersen (13), McAfee (9)

Personal Questions                    : Johnson (17), Petersen (15), McAfee (10)

Appeal to Democrats                 : Johnson (20), Petersen (17), McAfee (11)

Abortion                                 :  McAfee (14), Johnson (22), Petersen (18)       

Death Penalty                          :  McAfee (17), Petersen (20), Johnson (23)

Gay Marriage                           :  McAfee (20), Petersen (22), Johnson (24)

Gender Pay Gap                       :  Petersen (25), Johnson (26), McAfee (21)             

Vote For Other Pres. Candidate  :  Petersen (28), McAfee (23), Johnson (27)

 

If my counting is right, the winner by a small margin is Petersen, one point ahead of Johnson.

Nonetheless, if I had to decide who I would vote for, ultimately, Gary Johnson would have my support. McAfee strikes me as a bit of a black horse. He leaves me with the impression that some of his views are not too well thought through. Petersen is personable, a good communicator, with an aura of deep conviction, but his palpable faith comes with the downside of rather a mechanical approach to the issues. Johnson is the one who convinces me that his principles do not cut him off from reality and people with other beliefs.

Related articles

The Age of Liberalism

Forgotten Emergence - The Spontaneous Order of Politics

Paul on Trump

Image credit.

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul explains his stance on Trump.

 

 

A Civilizational Crisis

Image credit.

Following up on Immigration and Freedom (4/10) - Violence and Political Collapse:

Writes David P. Goldman,

I have long believed that the most likely outcome of Islam’s civilizational crisis is a body count that would beggar the last century’s world wars.

And, even if the best possible outcome is achieved, the author expects,

There would be no glorious era of Arab democracy, no Arab spring, no happy ending, just a less murderous sort of despotism and an armistice rather than a real peace between Shia and Sunni. That is as good as ever it will get in that miserable region.

At any rate, too fragile are the solutions sketched in the below article that they would seem likely to succeed. Also, I have reservations concerning the author's hopes for the requisite statesmanship.

Still, it is a remarkable article that has yielded me new perspectives and - in many ways - a surprisingly conclusive global assessment of the region and its players (including the US and Europe).

Recommended reading:

The great task of diplomacy in the 21^st century is a sad and dreary one, namely managing the decline of Muslim civilization. There is a parallel to the great diplomatic problem of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which the diplomats bungled horribly.

It is no job for the idealistic, namely the Americans, nor for the squeamish, namely the Europeans. The breakdown of civil order in a great arc from Beirut to Basra has already displaced 20 million people and raised the world refugee count from 40 million in 2011 to 60 million in 2014, with scores of millions at risk. After it failed to build democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States fell into a sullen torpor in which serious discussion of intervention in the regime is excluded. The hypocritical Europeans averted their eyes until millions of desperate people appeared on their doorstep, and remain clueless in the face of the worst humanitarian crisis since the last world war.

That leaves Vladimir Putin as the last, best hope of a region already halfway over the brink into the abyss. That is a disturbing thought, because the Russian leader has played the spoiler rather than the statesman in his wrangling with Western powers over the past decade and a half. Nonetheless, Russia has an existential interest in sorting out the Levant. Muslims comprise a seventh of the population of the Russian Federation, and the growing influence of ISIS threatens to give a fresh wind to terrorism inside Russia.

Make sure to read the rest at the source.

Reminiscences of a Quantitative Easer

Image credit.

Remembering his time at the Fed, Andrew Huszar writes:

I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time. [...]

Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed's trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE's bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history. [...]

The source.

Hat tip to Steve Kates at Catallaxy Files, who comments

What they are doing is riding on the back of a tiger. All those idiots who voted for Obama to help the poor and the disadvantaged, what a bad joke that is. If Goldman Sachs is your favourite charity then maybe you have a point.

Death of the Republican Party?

Image credit.

I wonder whether what is happening in America parallels the social democratisation of the dominant parties long prevalent in Germany. If the below author is right, cannot what he argues be interpreted to mean that the political system of the US is effectively shedding the non-social-democratic fringe? Democrats and Republicans are vying for support by the social democratic majority. That, of course, assumes that the author's statistical estimates of the number of anti-establishment Republicans are exaggerated:

The Republican Party died during the struggle over Obamacare. Its most vital elected officials chose to represent their voters. This left their erstwhile leaders to continue pursuing acceptance by the ruling party, its press and its class. The result is a new party that represents the roughly three fourths of Republican voters whose social identities are alien to those of the ruling class and whose political identity is defined by opposition to the ruling party. These voters are outsiders to modern America’s power structure. Hence the new party that represents them is a “country party” in the British tradition of Viscount Bolingbroke’s early eighteenth century Whigs, who represented the country class against the royal court and its allies in Parliament. The forthcoming food fight over the name “Republican” is of secondary importance. [...]

This has been a long time coming. Obamacare was a trigger, not a cause. While a majority of Democrats feel that officials who bear that label represent them well, only about a fourth of Republican voters and an even smaller proportion of independents trust Republican officials to represent them. [...]

Rather than defending their voters’ socio-political identities, they ignore, soft-pedal, or give mere lip service to their voters’ concerns. It chooses candidates for office whose election only steadies America on a course of which most Americans disapprove. [...]

The issue groups’ joint endeavor to de-fund Obamacare, their joint rejection of the Republican Party’s leadership, and the collaboration of Republican legislators who had been endorsed by some but not others of these groups, effectively forms a new party. The question is not what the Republican Establishment will do with these dissidents but what the dissidents will do with the Establishment.

Make sure to read the entire article.

Liberty - Always a Political Attempt

Image credit.

I have just contributed the below three comments to a post at Cafe Hayek. And I got my first "Like"; it turned out I received it from Laura Ebke, our wonderful host here at RSE. Laura, and Eric Parks, have helped me develop my thinking during the four years that I have been privileged to participate in Laura's blog. While Laura holds a PhD in the discipline, I am only beginning to realise just how important political science is in promoting, and understanding, the conditions of liberty.

What worries me is a pronounced tendency within the libertarian movement whereby increasingly vigilance vis-à-vis the state is turning into unconditional verbal opposition, a habit of lamentation and a dogmatic moral posture that condemns anyone who takes the original view of classical liberalism (according to which there is a need to work through the political process and with the state) or indeed anyone who does not endorse (an often only implied) anarchism. Note one of the replies for the accusation levelled at me, and the sophisticated, contradiction-free unpacking of an anarchist's idea of markets and politics.

If there can be so much disagreement between people who support liberty (let alone the larger community), I cannot see how these rival views are ever to be dealt with other than through the means and channels of political competition. Analogously, there is the untenable presumption that ideas on what a market is, how it works, and what action will further or damage the market represent an uncontroverted, pristine standard known to the believer in liberty, if only he is of the true kind. Add to all this, that even tiny differences, once thrown into the pond of human rivalry can quickly expand to vast concentric circles. In a word: no one can escape from politics. Liberty will always be a political attempt.

Commenting on a piece by Don Boudreaux, I put these questions to him.

Can markets handle the task of protecting themselves against adverse political influence on them? By which mechanism do markets achieve this feat? If markets are incapable of achieving this aim, may politics and the state play a certain role in protecting markets?

I did not get an answer, but a reader replied:

What incentive do politicians have for protecting a market that disempowers them?

To which I replied:

Ask Ron Paul, Ludwig Erhard, Leszek Balcerowicz [thanks, Eric Parks] ...

Also, there are good reasons to assume that "the State" pursues the duplex aim of wealth and power maximisation. There is ample evidence that some states are considerably more successful at balancing these two needs: enforcing property rights etc that make for a powerful economy (creating a rich resource basis for the state) AND marshalling political support to cement its power base. My own native Germany and the USA are a lot better at this than Somalia, say, or North Korea, and the reason why is that we have hugely better governments/states, i.e. governments that are far more protective and supportive of the institutions of liberty than other countries. And this is largely because there are people who are prepared to fight with the requisite and indispensable political means for a state that respects liberty.

I concluded by addressing a second remark to Don Boudreaux:

You write: "People too often suppose that large social problems can be solved only by deciding ahead of time which particular group of people and procedures hold the key to the solution." This is certainly a big, chronic problem, masterfully explained by Hayek. However, the insertion "too often" in your proposition is important. For some large social problems can be solved only by deciding ahead of time which particular group of people (those of our libertarian convictions and knowledge) and procedures (those favoured by us, the rule of law and other norms conducive to free markets) hold the key to the solution. Unless libertarians succeed in the political process thereby managing to play a leading role in forming the nature of the state, the requirements of markets and liberty are in danger to be violated by other participants in the political process. Unless it can be shown that markets qua markets can handle the task of protecting themselves against adverse political influence. Like Armen Alchian, however, I have never found evidence to support the assumption that markets can take care of their own preconditions.

See also A Hard Day's Work, More Thoughts on the State, and States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another.

Your Votes Don’t Matter

What is important for party pols to realize is that they must do as they’re told rather than listen to their constituents:

Reps. David Schweikert of Arizona and Walter Jones of North Carolina were booted from the Financial Services Committee. Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan and Tim Huelskamp of Kansas were removed from the Budget Committee.

According to a source, Schweikert was told that he was ousted in part because his “votes were not in lockstep with leadership.”

Full story.

Political parties… can’t live with them, can’t get elected without them.

Ron Paul Voters

On election day, we learned that it's one thing to dis Ron Paul and his delegates. It's quite another to disenfranchise them. Ron Holland writes:

The world knows how the Romney campaign and GOP establishment trashed Ron Paul and his supporters during the GOP primary season and in front of millions at the GOP national convention.

… The Republican Party would have captured the Senate and they would have millions of young supporters promoting both the party and our freedom agenda. But this was not to be, due to the arrogance and animosity of the GOP big-wigs and the Republican operatives running the Romney campaign.

This from Muir Boda:

The Republican Party had an opportunity to bring into its fold a generation of a well-organized grass roots effort. It had an opportunity to appeal to millions of independent, unaffiliated and libertarian leaning Americans who did one of three things, vote for Gary Johnson, write in Ron Paul or not vote at all.

Instead, Mitt Romney and the Republican Establishment did everything they could to silence, hinder and obstruct Ron Paul and his supporters. They changed the rules at the last minute at the Republican National Convention, looked for ways to disqualify Paul’s delegates and tried to disrupt its own nominating process in every state. Simply put, Mitt Romney did not have to cheat to win the Republican nomination, but he did anyway.

I'd like to agree with these assessments, but I can't help but think about how close the election was - even with Paul followers eschewing the GOP. Romney and the GOP machine still got 58 million votes to Obama's 60 million. While I realize that votes by states and electoral paths matter more, and that swing states could have resulted differently with more republican votes, it was still close without Dr. Paul's happy band of liberty lovers.

Maybe we mattered more in local political races? But at the federal level I'm not so sure. Also, I wonder just how badly the GOP really wanted this current mess. With a dodgy economy, a looming fiscal cliff, and Obamacare coming online in 2014, it could be they have more to gain in the coming years with the democrats donning the façade of "conductor" during a train wreck.

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and that they truly are controlling, power-hungry goons bent on severely breaking their own rules to portray a unified neocon front. Answers to such questions will appear in the future. Hopefully, more liberty will come, bringing with it the answers I wanted to hear.

Voting for Dummies

Voting for lesser evil can prove difficult when such evil has become too great in its own right. Columnist Conor Friedersdorf from ‘The Atlantic’ writes how he will vote third party:

I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.

Nope.

There are folks on the left who feel that way, of course. Some of them were protesting with the Occupy movement at the DNC. But the vast majority don't just continue supporting Obama. They can't even comprehend how anyone would decide differently. In a recent post, I excoriated the GOP and its conservative base for operating in a fantasy land with insufficient respect for empiricism or honest argument.

I ended the post with a one-line dig at the Democratic Party. "To hell with them both," I fumed.

… There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won't win. I am supporting him because he ought to.

… If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn't as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don't know. I can imagine he'd kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn't kill any. I can imagine that he'd kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

To hell with them both.

I’ve written many times that “If you don’t vote your conscience, why should your representatives?”. The political transgressions appear far more grave than in the past; their existence due, in large part, to a perceived immunity from backlash. Such worrisome traits are then buried under election rhetoric by both parties, who offer up their best argument for victory by pointing out the impending consequences of their loss! Is that any way to run a country?

The trends and precedents mentioned show that elections are not about one president, per se, but the ratcheting effect of government power over time, achieved by a duopoly perpetuated by two opposing camps; very similar to one another but containing just enough variation to entrench the cycle. My hat is off to the system designers. It’s a tough nut to crack. And getting nuttier by the day.