5/28/2014
PICTORIAL PROGRESSIVE PRIMER--101
GOAFS II: #96
PICTORIAL PRIMER of
PRAGMATIC PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL
PRACTICE—101
5.28.14
Short Summary: An Imperial Presidency
Five years of Obama Administration
Foreign Policy, the travels of a weightless cypher
making it up as he goes along.
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for
Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and
rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
email: cmudgeon@windstream.net
5/21/2014
THE THREAT OF ELITISM
GOAFS II: #95
THE THREAT OF ELITISM
5.21.14
Webster’s
Ninth College Dictionary has three meanings for elitism:
1.
Leadership or rule by an elite.
2.
Belief
in or advocacy of such elitism.
3.
Consciousness
of being or belonging to an elite.
There are essentially
two meanings given for elite:
1.
The
choice part or segment; esp: a socially
superior group.
2.
A
powerful minority group—(a power inside the government).
Elite comes
from the Latin root, lego, which
means “I choose.” As you can see from the meanings above, it is a perfect fit
for the autonomous man that dominates
our culture of humanism today. Eve said, “I choose” and Adam said, “I choose,”
and on those choices stand all that is less than perfect in this world.
The shelf-life
of constitutional republics through history has been short. This is primarily
because no man is fit to govern another.
In his Republic Plato contended that the
well-ordered soul consisted of three parts; appetite, emotion and reason. These three parts are governed
by moderation (appetite), fortitude (emotion), wisdom, and justice (reason).
There is a
lot more to it than this but his bottom line is that these virtues are all
tools of self-control, tools of self government. Plato was a philosopher, not a
prophet or theologian, so he missed one more, maybe the biggest virtue
required, humility. The Greeks
learned this this hard way--but the essential point he was making was that good government requires a self-disciplined
virtuous people. Good government starts at home, in the homes. To put it simply,
you can draw a direct line between families with a crushing credit card debt,
and a country with a crushing national debt.
The deep
truths of democracy, that no man is really fit to govern another and that
people ought to have a meaningful say in the decisions that determine how they
live, give the lie to all utopian political schemes. They are the reason why
government must be limited, balanced and controlled. The U.S. Constitution was
a good start in this effort, but it has been substantially eroded during the
past hundred years, and seems under even more serious threat today. The threats
come from many directions, I will just list a few and leave you to ponder the
details which are abundantly self-evident.
1.
We
are beset by advancing technocracy
presided over by scientific elites who claim entitlement to determine public
policy because of their resumed “expertise,” which is not to be questioned by
pundits, politicians, or even their own colleagues with minority opinions. The
operative phrase from the elite is “The debate is over and settled, shut up and
move on.” (There has been a lot of that going on in the last five years.)
2.
The
big money establishment has enormous
influence in both the private sector and the government sector—it manages to
consistently come out on top at the expense of the ordinary people, even when
it has created the mess that we are often in. (The housing bubble, the bank
bailout, Solyndra, etc.)
3.
The
Fabian socialist schemes of the
present progressive liberal administration pit the progressive elites now
governing against the people they are supposed to represent because, after all,
they know best how the rest of us should conduct our lives. So they are busily
enacting policies in apparent disregard of public opinion and traditional
American values and principles. (The Affordable Health Care Act, refusal to
enforce border security, refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act,
Michelle Obama’s crusade to determine how we eat,. etc., etc., etc.)
4.
A Supreme Court that has shifted in the last 50 years from
interpreting the laws to making the laws. Judicial supremacy has enabled the
courts to substitute for the Framers’ Constitution a so-called Living
Constitution, allowing the courts to interpret the document in ways that
conform to modern tastes – especially to the tastes of the governing elites. (Roe
v. Wade, the ACA, etc., etc., etc. Five-vote majorities on the Supreme Court
have decided the last four critical constitution cases—upholding ACA,
invalidating Arizona’s immigration law, invalidating California’s Proposition
8, and DOMA ruling the state law banning same sex marriage unconstitutional—all
against the Founders, against American public opinion, and against democracy).
These threats,
and many others, to our constitutional democracy are rooted in elitism, the
belief or conviction that ordinary people are not really fit to govern
themselves and that groups of people “in the know” – whether scientific,
technological, economic, political, legal, or academic – elites can do a better
job and are therefore entitled to do the governing for the rest of us. I say
this is unmitigated codswallop of the highest order and ought to be ridiculed,
refuted and resisted at every opportunity!
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for
Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and
rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
email: cmudgeon@windstream.net
5/14/2014
NEGOTIATING WITH VLAD THE IMPALER
GOAFS II: #94
NEGOTIATING WITH VLAD
THE IMPALER
5.14.14
Sometimes it
is amazing to notice in a time when everything is changing at warp speed, or
seems to be, that many things do not change at all. In the May 5th
National Review John R. Bolton writes of A
better Russian Reset. He suggests that we need a foreign policy that would
equip us to deal with the Putin regime. (one wag has characterized our current
foreign policy and most potent weapon as “passive-aggressive symbolic
disapproval”.)
Had they
given Bolton the space, he could have easily broadened focus to include Israel,
Palestine,
Syria, Iran, Libya, Moscow, and North Koera. In this article he quotes Sir William
Hayter, a British Ambassador to Moscow in the 1950’s speaking of Russia’s
concept of diplomacy;
“Negotiation with the Russians does occur, from time to time,
but it requires no particular skill. The Russians are not to be persuaded by eloquence
or convinced by reasoned arguments. They rely on what Stalin used to call the
proper basis of international policy, the calculation of forces. So no case,
however skillfully deployed, however clearly demonstrated as irrefutable, will
move them from what they have previously decided to do; the only way of
changing their purpose is to demonstrate that they have no advantageous
alternative, that what they want to do is not possible. Negotiations with the
Russians are therefore very mechanical; and they are probably better conducted
on paper than by word of mouth.”
Reading
this I was reminded of another lesson on negotiating America learned over 200
years ago. At the time of the Revolutionary war England kept a substantial
naval force in the Mediterranean to protect her merchant ships from the Barbary
Pirates sailing out of the Muslim ports along the coast of North Africa. The
pirates would grab a merchant ship and demand a large ransom in gold, weapons,
even small warships, to use in their buccaneering.
England
would not stand for this—it was bad for business, and the colonial merchant
ships profited from this protection. That all changed when the colonies won the
war. England stopped protecting the American ships and the new government in
America found itself with a serious problem. They had little money for bribes
and a very small navy, far to little to protect the ripe new U.S. merchant ship
targets from these Muslim-sponsored Corsairs.
The
politicians in Congress dithered for about two years talking and paying the
bribes they could afford, but the Muslim rulers were just greedy enough to push
America too far. One day a U.S. Navy ship showed up in port with a huge bribe
of gold and a small warship, gifts to the Pasha in exchange for two colonial
merchant ships and their cargos. The Pasha gave them a big welcome with fireworks, bands, and lots of pomp and
ceremony. When it came time to hand over the gold, the Pasha handed the envoy a
new bill, a big one to cover the cost of gun powder and other expenses of the
welcome. The good news was that this event was the beginning of a serious U.S.
Navy. America’s naval power steadily grew until the progressive Democrats
started seriously reducing it 200 years later.
Michael
B. Boren sums the lesson up this way;
“Since the days if the
Barbary Pirates, American Presidents have had only two choices in dealing with
Islam-‐either some form of bribery and appeasement or the deployment of
power.”
Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, by Michael B. Oren
America’s
grade on understanding and applying these lesson is a mixed bag. We certainly
learned the bit about bribery and appeasement pretty well—the foreign aid
program bears eloquent witness to this. However its effectiveness has always
been questionable. Bowing and scraping to Saudi Princes may make the bower feel
good, it has no effect on what the Princes will do or not do. Just as the new
small warship given to the Pasha was immediately manned and sent out to capture
more colonial merchant ships, so much of foreign aid has simply armed and
strengthened the enemies of America.
The current
affair in the Ukraine also displays a President and his Secretary of State who are
clueless, and blissfully unaware of the way Vladimir Putin thinks. They wander
loudly, sternly lecturing the enemy, in a pink cloud of magic thinking as they attempt
to deal with the hard realities of Russia and the Middle East. Instead of
strategic foresight and tactical wisdom, our foreign policy displays daily the
scary shortcomings of bowing, scraping, bloviating, and leading from behind.
While we play small ball, the Russians play “capture the flag” according to
their own rules.
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for
Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and
rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
email: cmudgeon@windstream.net
