The Culture That the Socialist Left Has Wrought

The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of those concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same cliches, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not the authors but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves.

The grand design, its supported say, should be implemented at all cost because it is believed to bring with itself freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other liberal-democratic treasures. Therefore, all barriers that block its coming can and must be broken down, also for the benefit of those who put up these barriers. If abortion means freedom, then we should raise the consciousness of those who think differently; force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. If political correctness is a necessity of life in the liberal-democratic society, then imposing it is, after all, nothing else but a measure of its emancipation for all.  The groups that managed to capture this liberal phraseology and the logic that underlies it—such as homosexuals and feminists—have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government to the extent that the state institutions, including the courts, have taken upon themselves the task of breaking the resistance of less conscious and more stubborn groups—that is, of coercing them to freedom.

Today, those who write and speak not only face more limitations than they used to, but all the institutions and communities that traditionally stood in the way of this “coercion to freedom” are being dismantled. As in all utopias, so in a liberal democracy it is believed that the irrational residues of the past should be removed.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.66-67

Identity Group Politics is From Leftists, and is About Control

The starting position of liberalism—and at the same time a final perspective—is a hypothetical situation in which relatively independent units cooperate through a system of contracts. The democratization turned liberalism into a doctrine in which the primary agents were no longer individuals, but groups and the institutions of the democratic state. Instead of individuals striving for the enrichment of social capital with new ideas and aspirations, there emerged people voicing demands called rights and acting within the scope of organized groups. These groups subsequently petitioned state institutions and exerted pressure on them to change legislation and political practices; over time, they began to affect judicial decisions by the courts, demanding legal acceptance of their position and acquired privileges. In the final outcome the state in liberal democracy ceased to be an institution pursuing the common good, but became a hostage of groups that treated it solely as an instrument of change securing their interests.

The state, more and more involved in the process of supporting group aspirations, largely lost its general republican character and turned into a conglomerate of the social, economic, cultural, and other policy programs enacted and imposed through democratic procedures. This, in turn, meant that the state had to take over more and more specific responsibilities, far beyond the normal operations of the state apparatus. As the new expectations of the groups had more and more to do with their status and social recognition, the traditional means of the state policy were no longer sufficient. It became necessary to intervene deeply into the social substance—where the roots of status and recognition resided—either through direct political action or indirectly by changing the laws, making appropriate judicial decisions, and adjusting morality and social mores drastically to guarantee equality.  The state representatives, armed with the rhetoric of anti discrimination, felt if was their duty to regulate matters that for too long had remained unregulated, which often means giving privileges to certain groups and taking them away from others.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.61-62

Invented “Dignity”

Since the issue of the [1948] Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born, without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.33

Charity?

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

John D. Rockefeller

“Entitlements” are Bankrupting the USA

The thing that’s unleashed the federal leviathan the most since our founding is the concept of entitlements. In 1933, the modern entitlement state was born in the form of the federal government’s first and most expensive income transfer program: Social Security. In the 1960s, LJB launched the Great Society, creating a whole new menu of entitlement programs, chief among them Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Once created, these redistribution programs were virtually impossible to restrain.

Glenn Beck, Arguing With Idiots, pg.208

Government Programs Are Slavery

Government programs didn’t arise because the people demanded them or because the free market was unable to provide needed services.  They arose because the politicians found them to be a convenient way to buy votes with other people’s money, a convenient way to enlarge their own power, a convenient way to reward their political cronies, and a convenient way to keep people dependent on government.

Harry Browne

Responsibility is Lacking in Today's Culture

“Responsibility” poses a quandary for us today, as it presupposes a standard toward which to be responsible. But as standards have been attacked as products of “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “imperialism,” and other nefarious forces, the notion of duty has steadily vanished.

The result has been a growing sense of entitlement and narcissism. Consider the widespread hostility toward a recent proposal to eliminate loan “forgiveness” for graduate students. The policy would stop the government from “forgiving” student loan debt after a certain number of years. The idea is that, if one is privileged enough to go to graduate school, one who isn’t shouldn’t be forced to pay for the one who is.

However, one outlet described the idea as a “sick joke. A billionaire president and billionaire education secretary, neither of whom spent a single day of their lives in public service before stumbling their way into positions of immense power, are targeting a program that’s basically meant to make life in underpaid government work a little more tenable.”

Only a mindset that says “I am entitled to graduate school on another’s dime” would argue that preventing other people from being forced to pay for (“forgive”) another’s loan is a “sick joke.” Furthermore, the idea that “public service”—meaning government employment—is nobler than private-sector work is only further evidence of our cultural entitlement. Private markets create wealth, products, and jobs, which improve lives. Government merely consumes the wealth private markets create. That those who consume feel entitled to the wealth created by others is the height of the narcissism that pervades modern society.

Without standards of virtue which transcend the self, the self becomes the standard. At that point, as Protagoras remarked, “Man is the measure of all things.” In today’s culture, that is increasingly so.

David Weinberger, “We Don’t Have An Income Inequality Problem, We Have An Ego Problem”

Describing the Current American Culture

A family of little faith is doomed.  Children will be allowed to spend precious and unrecoverable hours before a television.  They will be allowed a virtually unrestricted diet of fats and sweets.  They will know little discipline, little postponement of gratification, because the convenience of the present is of far greater priority to their parents than the long-term health and social development of the children.  The pleasures and benefits of this indulgent policy are immediately felt; its price will be paid far off into the future.  Seeing that ultimate price demands faith the family does not possess.

A society of no faith is equally doomed.  They will demand goodies from their leaders who, lacking the faith to say no, gladly indulge the populace in exchange for the votes that keep them in power.  They know full well that the price will have to be paid on some future leader’s watch.  At least it won’t be paid on theirs.  Whether the issue is Social Security, socialized medicine, rent control, making married couples pay more tax than they would pay were they single, or any other fiscal policy, too many of us see only the immediate benefits. We have been indoctrinated with the propaganda of compassion. Feeling people’s pain sounds noble and good. In reality it serves the need of those who seek to benefit now by making future generations pay the price.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.245

Sliding Toward Oblivion

When a president or group of legislators proudly announce plans to right something they perceive as a grave social problem, it usually involves someone else paying the bill. It may well be a monetary cost that will be paid by some large and unidentified group of taxpayers, or it may be a price paid by a future generation of Americans who will have to live in a slightly less benign world. Meanwhile, the benefited parties can be brought to the White House lawn for a public relations photo opportunity. The president tells the world about his compassion and concern for these unfortunate people. He waves the new legislation aloft and proudly declares the end of some injustice. Everyone smiles for the cameras. Everyone, that is, except those invisible people who are left holding the bag.

Why does the future become less important, and immediate gratification more important, as societies slide toward oblivion?

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.244-245

Freedom and Obligation

Our era is one in which different treatment or different outcomes are inherently suspect. It is all too commonly thought that we all deserve the same reward or the same status, notwithstanding the differences in our efforts or in our abilities. This is why we hear so often about what is deserved or who is entitled. By this way of thinking, the student who treats spring break like a seven-day bacchanalia is entitled to the same success as the conscientious classmate who works and studies while he plays. And isn’t this same sense of entitlement often applied today to freedom? . . .

Today, when it seems that grievance rather than responsibility is the main means of elevation, my grandfather’s beliefs may sound odd or discordant. But he and others like him at the time resolved to conduct themselves in a way consistent with America’s ideals. They were law-abiding, hardworking, and disciplined. They discharged their responsibilities to their families and neighbors as best they could. They taught us that despite unfair treatment, we were to be good citizens and good people. If we were to have a functioning neighborhood, we first had to be good neighbors. If we were to have a good city, state, and country, we first had to be good citizens. The same went for our school and our church. We were to keep in mind the corporal works of mercy and the great commandment: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Being wronged by others did not justify reciprocal conduct. Right was right, and two wrongs did not make a right. What we wanted to do did not define what was right—nor, I might add, did our capacious litany of wants define liberty. Rather, what was right defined what we were required to do and what we were permitted to do. It defined our duties and our responsibilities. Whether those duties meant cutting our neighbor’s lawn, visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, or going off to war as my brother did, we were to discharge them honorably. . . .

Today there is much more focus on our rights and on what we are owed, and much less on our obligations and duties—unless, of course, it is about our duty to submit to some new proposed policy. . . .

My grandfather often reminded us that if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat, and that if we didn’t plant, we couldn’t harvest. There is always a relationship between responsibilities and benefits. In agrarian societies, that is more obvious. As society becomes more complex and specialized, it is more difficult to discern. But it is equally true. If you continue to run up charges on your credit card, at some point you reach your credit limit. If you continue to make withdrawals from your savings account, you eventually deplete your funds. Likewise, if we continue to consume the benefits of a free society without replenishing or nourishing that society, we will eventually deplete that as well.  If we are content to let others do the  work of replenishing and defending liberty while we consume the benefits, we will someday run out of other people’s willingness to sacrifice—or even out of courageous people willing to make the sacrifice.

Clarence Thomas, “Freedom and Obligation,” 2016 Hillsdale College Commencement Address.

The Constitution Is Against Welfare

Preferential Treatment

The View From the Liberal Zookeepers

One popular tactic used by champions of the welfare state is to slander those who have worked diligently for their success.  The slander has worked, leading to a public perception that the rich got that way by stealing from the poor.  This perception includes that wealth-producing activities are unseemly and that free-market economic activity causes, rather than cures, poverty.  Just as it is wrong for a zookeeper to allow one elephant to eat considerably more than another, so it must be wrong for the government to allow one human or company to acquire or possess significantly more than another.

This view is consistent, of course, with the Leftist view that humans are merely another species of animal.  Secularists believe, if they stop to actually think about it, that humans contribute little or nothing to the satisfying of their needs.  Like animals, they can only exist on what is already available.  In other words, humans consume.  Therefore, isn’t it only proper of our Beltway zookeepers to equalize distribution and consumption?  Unfortunately, our nation’s politically correct (but morally incorrect) answer is to take from those who seem to have too much and redistribute the proceeds to those who seem to have too little, just as a responsible zookeeper would do.

In the view of government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs who create and market new technology and products in our country are very smart animals, but animals nevertheless.  By some form of skullduggery, under cover of darkness while the zookeepers were not watching, these entrepreneurs somehow seized more that their “fair” share.  They are obviously depriving others of that to which they are entitled.  After all, there are only so many bones, fish and pieces of meat available in the keepers’ bucket.

Thus our government zookeepers attempt to repair their mistakes by the vigilant taxation and prosecution of companies which have been “too” successful.  To gain votes, politicians often encourage those who have made self-destructive decisions in their lives to feel scorn for those who deployed self-discipline to become productive.  There is no better way than to exhibit a revulsion for what I call ethical capitalism.  Today we hear people referring to the 1980s as a period of moral depravity.  These individuals consider the miracle of economic enterprise to be the human equivalent of dogs fighting over a bone.

When America followed the biblical blueprint, it was clear that buying, selling, owning property , and being successful in business should evoke no psychological discomfort.  Economic activity is another way in which we satisfyingly distance ourselves from the animal kingdom and justify our humanity.

But if we continue to accept the godless alternative, then indeed we do not differ in kind from monkeys or other animals, only in degree.  Animals do not create wealth, they merely seize the commodities they need; people obviously do the same.  They may employ more sophisticated methods like bonds, debentures, taxation, and penalization of success, but it is seizing nonetheless.  Is it merely coincidence that those who most strongly advance evolution as the one and only approach to our origins are also those who most strongly oppose the free market?

Clearly, morally sensitive people must decry this activity.  If God created us and touched us with His abilities, then we are qualitatively different from animals.  Our ability to speak and to create is unique.  Therefore, animals plunder but people profit; the creation of wealth is an expression of our godly origins.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.227-228

A Living Wage But Wage Equality?

Entitled?

Particular individuals or groups can be given many things, to which politicians say they are "entitled," only if other people are forced by the government to provide those things to people who don't need to lift a finger to earn them. All the fancy talk about "entitlement" means simply forcing some people to work to produce things for other people, who have no obligation to work.

Thomas Sowell, “Toxic Words”

Should We Lower Standards to Prevent People From Being “Excluded”?

Performance Standards are often depicted as mere subjective barriers reflecting the biases of those who create them.  Thus Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University charges “insincerity” to opponents of affirmative action who want everyone to compete by the same rules by saying that “the playing field is already tilted” in favor of the majority because “the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been systematically excluded.”  With the word “excluded” being used in very elastic senses today, it is hard to know how this statement differs from saying that people from different cultural backgrounds have the prerequisites for various activities to varying extents.  In a similar vein, former Harvard president Derek Bok said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to everyone else would be to “exclude them from the university.”  Among other things, this ignores the fact that blacks were receiving both college and postgraduate degrees from Harvard in the nineteenth century, when it was very unlikely that they were being admitted under lower standards.  The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in using ex ante words like “exclude” to describe ex post results.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.199

Welfare Can Make Things Worse

Government aid can actually make things worse.  By handing out welfare checks impersonally to all who qualify, without addressing the underlying behavioral problems, the government in essence “rewards” antisocial and dysfunctional patterns.  And any behavior the government rewards will generally tend to increase.  As one perceptive nineteenth-century critic noted, government assistance is a “mighty solvent to sunder the ties of kinship, to quench the affections of family, to suppress in the poor themselves the instinct of self-reliance and self-respect—to convert them into paupers.”

Nancy Pearcey, “Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity,” pg.61

Public Dole Can Be Harmful

There are certainly times when the poor do require help in the form of cash and non cash benefits in the present, in the short run.  But a system of “aid” that encourages people to become dependent on the dole, that robs the poor of any incentive to seek ways of helping themselves, that leads the poor into a poverty trap, is hardly a model of genuine compassion or of wise public policy.

Ronald Nash, Poverty and Wealth: The Christian Debate Over Capitalism, pg. 167.  Cited by David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times, pg.709

College is NOT a Right

The idea that college in particular should be free is not only absurd and unworkable but incredibly offensive to any self-sufficient adult (a small minority, I admit). I’ve got news for you, my fellow young people, college isn’t a human right. It’s also not a necessity. I pay a mortgage and support a family of four by myself, with no government handouts, and I do it without a college degree. It is possible. If you can’t afford college — and God knows it’s obscenely expensive and not worth the investment for most people — don’t go. Forge your own path. Think for yourself. Do something different with your life. You really want to drive down college costs? That’s how you do it. You can eliminate your own college expenses by simply choosing not to take on any college expenses. Crazy how that works, isn’t it? But that’s not what liberals want to hear. They want to hear about the crusty old socialist genie who will make free stuff appear out of thin air.

Matt Walsh

The Demand for 'Participation' Trophies

When you hear the rhetoric of wealth redistribution and “paying a fair share,” it is rooted in the belief that someone must pay for others to receive the “participation” trophy. Instead of economic policies that inspire more people to engage in the free enterprise system and the opportunity economy, progressive socialists advance policies to punish the players on the field. When you can stand up and profess in America “if you own a business, you didn’t build that,” it reflects a sense that the sweat from the brow of the individual to produce – to score touchdowns, goals, runs – is no longer regarded. The efforts of those on the field only serves to produce the required resources for some to make “participation” trophies for others.

We are slowly moving away from what the American dream truly represents – creating victors, champions. We have those who through the giving away of the little plastic trophy are making victims.

The liberal progressive governing philosophy is based upon an expansion of dependency; the welfare nanny-state. By doing so, they raise taxes on the producers, the earners, the folks scoring touchdowns for our country. They must do so in order to produce the “participation” trophy that some will place upon their mantle – and it results in a sense of entitlement, and false esteem. But the givers of the little plastic trophy feel good about themselves, at the expense of those from whom they take, by way of redistribution. The result is a reticence by those who are on the field, in the market, because they recognize the diminishing return on their commitment to excellence.

The progressive socialists embrace this principle of egalitarianism and call it “social justice” and fairness. We see it when schools begin to eliminate the recognition of valedictorians and salutatorians to protect the esteem of others because they did not achieve similar excellence. When we punish those who embody Jefferson’s assertion that we have an unalienable right to pursue happiness then we erode the fundamental aspect of the equality of opportunity.
It is then replaced by a government guarantee of happiness, which must be resourced as the goal becomes equality of outcomes.

In the end, the “participation” trophy becomes that which some long for and worship as they lose their sense of individuality, and the ability to seek out their own personal accomplishments.

Allen West, “The Fallacy of the Participation Trophy”