America rediscovers its political roots
Political activism in America is experiencing a rebirth “before our very eyes and ears,” to steal one of Rush Limbaugh’s oft-used phrases. Â I was reminded of this last night as I watched Glenn Beck’s program and heard Limbaugh respond (as Beck’s guest) to Beck’s concern that the Obama administration is building an army of activists which may be preparing to seize control of the U.S. government at an opportune moment. Â After responding that he didn’t believe such a move would succeed given the wealth of information flowing forth from conservative talk radio and television, Rush made what I consider a critically important observation:
Look at the healthcare situation — what’s happening right now. Â The genuine passion — the REAL passion is in individual Americans’ hearts and minds. Â INDIVIDUALS are showing up. Â They may be going to the web to find out where these town halls are, but they’re showing up because individually they don’t want any part of this. Â The Obama army has to be bought and paid for. Â The Obama army has to be given marching orders. Â The Obama army is not showing up with any passion FOR Obama’s issue, which is healthcare. Â They’re showing up because they’ve been instructed to by bosses….and I’m gonna tell you something Glenn, passion, love of country, truth is going to out-maneuver and overpower fake passion…
This cuts to the heart of the matter.  Conservatives have bemoaned what they have perceived as the willingness of the American people to vote for ever more encroachment on their freedom in exchange for more and more government-provided “security.”  They have rightly attacked leaders in the Republican Party for failing to articulate and advance conservative principles, instead choosing to follow a path of fiscal irresponsibility and continuing government expansion.  David Horowitz and others have lamented the inability of the Republican Party to wage political war against a Democrat Party increasingly controlled by radical leftists.  Some pessimists on our side have even declared that conservatives have lost the battle and that America’s best days are behind her.
I submit that the furor over nationalized healthcare — the genuine grass-roots uprising against this initiative which the party in power so desperately wants — puts the lie to that notion. Â What we are witnessing should be an object lesson in how to win a political battle. It isn’t done by adopting the polite, civilized pose of a debating society member. Â It isn’t done by pleading for understanding and fairness and accepting your opponents false premises. Â It’s done with passion and energy and fearlessly framing issues with easily-understood and vivid imagery, as Sarah Palin did so brilliantly with her “death-panels” comment.
It’s true that the Republican Party has failed miserably to lead over the past eight years on domestic issues. Â One of the primary reasons we find ourselves at this critical juncture on healthcare is that Republicans failed to advance any meaningful reforms during the time they were in power. Â They dropped the ball and allowed the Democrats to frame the debate, as they have done countless times. Â We’re seeing, however, that American conservatives are no longer looking for “leaders” in the Republican Party or anywhere else to fight their battles for them. Â They’re taking that fight to the street, and it’s SUCCEEDING beyond measure.
The time for polite and civil discourse has ended. Â As in football, no team can win playing defense exclusively. Â You must have a good offense. This is what the Republican party seems to have forgotten, but the American people are re-discovering.
I can attest to this, even as a lowly Canadian. Here’s why:
For 20 years, Canadian government bureaucrats and their leftwing friends ran a shakedown scheme: if you said or did something “politically incorrect”, you could be hauled before a tribunal, your computers seized without a warrant, and bankrupted.
Finally they went after the wrong guy: Ezra Levant. He was the first person ever to videotape his hearing. Then he put it on YouTube, against the rules and his lawyer’s advice. He lost his magazine, he was out $100,000, he had no job and a baby was on the way — but he kept fighting.
Being Ezra Levant, he was rude, obnoxious, pushy, opinionated. He is one of the least popular people among our liberal elites. He’s made his share of enemies over the years befor this even started. Friends advised him to settle. To be more “Canadian”, more polite, quieter. Instead, he took on other people’s cases, raised money for them, wrote a book, kept yelling, and got sued again and again and his law license was threatened repeatedly. The more trouble he got into, the louder he got.
It has taken him (with help from others, including me) about 18 months to undo twenty years of bureaucratic evil in a very complacent, lazy, unprincipled nation. But it is working. When he and I had an event in a smallish college town earlier this year, big Liberal Party political operatives, along with the local (only) paper, tried to get it cancelled. Instead, we sold out the 600 seat theatre.
People told there own stories of political correctness gone wild, costing them their jobs and businesses. All this time, they had simply been waiting and hoping that SOMEBODY would have the nerve to stand up and fight, as dirty as he had to.
It took one person to go against all the profession legal and PR advice/wisdom, to be “unCanadian” and throw the debating society rules out the window. Now we are this close to closing down this semi-Stasi bureaucracy.
Be rude. Be prepared to be called names, esp. “racist”. Don’t listen to all the “experts.” Go all punk rock on their butts and watch what happens. If it can work in boring, polite Canada, imagine how well it will work in a real country
“Individual effort†under capitalism was rewarded during the early stages of capitalism! The era of rugged individualism no longer exists except in the eyes of those that are too blind to see. Those that choose to not see clearly is like an infatuated lover that refuses to see that what they are obsessed about has changed from what it was to what it has become.
Capitalism is in our modern era, a global oligarchy that needs to grab world resources on a very large scale so as to stay competitive inside the world market.
Competition has eliminated those that did not have the resources and were not able to acquire the resources that would make them competitive in the arena of large and hungry sharks. Those that are not blind will see that this fierce competition has resulted in a concentration of capital where today 10% of the total amount of people that own for a living own 90% of the worlds wealth, and 1% own half.
We live in an era of capitalism that if you want to survive and be able to compete you must surrender your individuality and become a cog in a giant multi national corporation, cartel or conglomerate. … The small individual enterprises are disappearing along with the mom and pop stores.
The middle class is rapidly disappearing as capitalism enters the stage of “Global corporatism†.. and multi national capitalism.
As a number of workers and former middle class business types are priced out of the market place and out of the system of capitalism they will have no other alternative then to rebel against this oligarchy and put into place a planned economy that will serve the entire world community.
http://despicable.wordpress.com/
“despicable”, your scholarship sure is. Seriously, was that a joke?
Thanks Kathy for your comment. America needs thousands of rude loud people who get more and more noisy and fierce!! We need to be the Lion of the U.S.
The democrats don’t like prosperity – but want to tax a middle class person more and more. They add more and more regulations – they are oppressing everyone because they are power hungry socialist.
“The Obama army has to be bought and paid for. The Obama army has to be given marching orders. The Obama army is not showing up with any passion FOR Obama’s issue, which is healthcare. They’re showing up because they’ve been instructed to by bosses….and I’m gonna tell you something Glenn, passion, love of country, truth is going to out-maneuver and overpower fake passion…”
I’m going to dissent from “Boss” Limbaugh here. (I love Olbermann’s nickname for Rush. I think all of us on the right should start using it in an ironic way. Everytime you mention Limbaugh put “Boss” in front of it. And when you’re speaking do the little air quotes — just a way to mock Olbermann’s paranoid fantasies of an army of conservative automatons.)
But back on track, I disagree with his point which seems to be that leftist advocates of “single-payer” and “public option” health insurance don’t really believe in it or are just following orders. I debate this issue with too many leftist friends who really don’t fit into that paradigm at all. Many of them are angry with Obama because Obama is smart enough NOT to push for a single-payer system and instead has been pushing other “reform” options like the “public option.” They don’t trust Obama. They think he’s a “corporatist” Democrat that’s in the pocket of the insurance companies.
There are plenty of people out there who are pushing for these reforms for honest reasons out of legitimate convictions. They want to change and “improve” the world. They’re just going about it in the wrong way. And they’ve failed to learn the lessons of failed government change. We need to teach them.
I think the lack of an offense and being polite and coming to the table with Dems (my American liberal friends [not Classical Liberalism] used to joke about “No Child Left behind” and Bush, and I would say, Hmmm… another leftist well-meaning long-term havoc creating idea [as usual] mono-fix, Bush gave to Kennedy and Kerry to craft in his endless bi-partisanship offerings, and bash Bush??
Offense in who’s crafting what and ruined good ideas with general big-govt. mono-fixes.
Time to get the many solutions and ideas out there. In IJ’s recent Liberty and Law, there is a good article on Congress and Judges, critiquing both Dems and Repubs. On page 4
http://www.ij.org/images/pdf_folder/liberty/ll_8-09.pdf
and was also in the WSJ on June 6, 2009.
A planned economy? Planned by and controlled by whom?
Hmmm, the 60’s were good for you, eh?
This is parody, isn’t it? I laughed all the way through this read. The middle class is disappearing only because the Democrats are killing it. You have Russia cutting off European gas, invading Georgia, helping Iran build a bomb, starvation in non-capitalist North Korea, the Taliban in the Swat Valley and you’re worried about who is selling Coca Cola to whom. Brilliant, absolutley brilliant! I’ll bet you even bought your bong from a socialist who cut his price to show solidarity with you and your lunatic views.
The governments “intervening” and stifling regulation has killed ability. Perhaps you should read Von Mises instead of old national socialist propaganda? I mean, National Socialists (communists, fascists and nazis) were all known to have wooed the same people before WWII (and after) and bragged about how good their propaganda was. That means the left.
Von Mises criticized Keans in rehashing a subject the Austrians had already debated and the french Interventionists had porposed decades before! But I guess Keynes didn’t read German or French.
Ignorance or propaganda (or the mindless repetition of both) no matter which angle one approaches, in my opinion.
I went to your blog. “what is happening is only happening because it’s the only possible thing that can happen?” You sound like a defeated person….or high. I suppose the jews should have just walked into the oven then because it was going to happen anyway? You should read the Declaration of Independence. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…..Those of the words of brave, great men who fought an assumed destiny to become something greater at great risk to themselves and everyone they loved. Man up!
It does not take a genius to figure out that the workers artists and technicians that produce the technology and all that is valuable in the world will one day wake up to the fact that the owners of the productive forces that exist in the world. have gathered unto them selves, the giant share of the pie called the gross national product.
This exploitation by large corporate entities that selfishly are becoming more corupt and more vulger in the displaying of this stolen treasure, will one day have to face the victims that had the value that they alone had produced by their labor and their technological know how.
This is CLASS WARFARE that one day even republicans will recognize exists in the land of milk and honey!
It appears that the right wing base of the republican party is rapidly becoming not relevant and remains ignorant of what is the reality of the 21st century!
The reason all societies and everything that exists evolve eventually to an advanced stage of development than what formerly existed is the fact that life is a learning experience. If you understand science you will know that science has discovered that matter in motion is a interaction between opposite poles and that all forms of matter and all that reflect matter in motion follows a similar path as they evolve. The evidence of the way all things evolve are similar so it should be no surprise that the stage of Feudalism gave birth to capitalism, and it will be followed by the stage of socialism and than a system of communism will evolve out of the system of socialism. It is inevitable! It has been written in the stars and into everything that ever existed. You may not like what the future will bring, but it will happen because when all other possible alternatives have been exausted, … it is the only thing that can possibly happen! …ITâ€S EVOLUTION!
PS. …What will happen in the future will not revolve around your subjective likes or dislikes. The future does not give a damn about your subjective notions of what should be. The objective conditions is that what rules.