The Left in Power
The theme of my book, The Left, the Right, and the State, is that both sides of the political aisle represent a grave threat to liberty — though each of a different sort. It is like two people tugging at a turkey’s wishbone: the turkey is liberty, and you are the bone.
We’ve lived through eight years of the threat from the Right. It was all about nationalism, militarism, war, torture, state secrets, attacks on privacy, the use of tax funds to subsidize “conservative values,” the outsourcing of government in a fascistic business-government partnership, the banning of products and services that government doesn’t like, the regimentation of educational life, government impositions in the name of security, and so on.
With the end of the Bush years, many of these threats have receded, if only slightly. Consider the problem of nationalism, for example. The neoconservatives who ran the country during the last two Bush terms exploited this dangerous impulse for all it was worth.
If you were not for their wars, you were against America, and hence deserving of jail without trial. The whole ideological apparatus of the Bush years was profoundly anti-intellectual, and while the neocons shouted down anyone who compared their administration to the Third Reich or Mussolini, the ideological comparison was actually quite apt: right-wing government control stems from the same motives of exalting security, discipline, and chauvinism above liberty.
In two short months, however, that ethos has subsided, and it has been replaced by a threat from the Left. It is tragic that Obama should be president at all. If we had a position called “national well-wisher,” “national greeter,” or “national symbol of accomplishment,” he would be perfect for the job. He is elegant, graceful, and articulate, and he inspires people in an unusual way. As chief policymaker, however, he has revealed himself as nothing more than a two-bit socialist.
After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.
What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas! Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools. Socialized medicine. Rock-bottom interest rates. Welfare! Every wish granted by government. Down with business. Down with business failures. Curbs on fat-cat pay. Down with Wall Street. Turn on the money spigots. Expropriate the expropriators. Subsidies for every lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois prejudice.
Thus are we again reminded of what a profound threat the Left represents to liberty. It’s been more than a decade now since we’ve seen this at work, and probably longer really. Clinton was a pain, but he was smart enough not to take his reigning ideological framework too seriously. He actually showed some deference to reality from time to time.
The Obamaites are different. They are woefully ignorant of economics. They seem to actually believe all that socialist claptrap that has provided an excuse for innumerable foreign dictators: the idea that government is the source of wealth and can make anything happen with the push of a button.
They see no limits to the possibility that government can make society perfect, righting every perceived social injustice, and bringing prosperity to all via stealing from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. Is there inequality? Mandate equality. Is there deprivation? Provide! Recession? Spend hundreds of billions!
What we have here is not just a profound love of the state; it is a profound confidence in the capacity of the unlimited state to create heaven on earth. How does this square with the idea of human liberty, of social cooperation, and of the rights of all? Herein lies the great mystery of leftism. The Left seems oblivious to the relationship between their chosen means and their ends. It’s not that they hate liberty as such; it is that they believe that it must always take a backseat to other social priorities, like equality. In the end, they have a tendency to build the total state and find themselves taken aback when the whole of society ends up in a cage.
Those Obamaites! So compassionate, loving, universally minded, progressive — except that their ideological cousins managed to starve and destroy whole civilizations. Loyalty to their creed means death, because their ideology is the pathway to the gulag — and for one simple reason: their preferred means of social change is the state. The state is always and everywhere a threat to liberty, and liberty is the basic building block of prosperity and civilization.
Despite the slogans about progress, the upshot of the Obama administration is as deeply reactionary as anything that Bush conjured up. Despite all the hype and hope, what Obama offers is nothing new. It amounts to the robber state and the regimentation of society, a plan that will kill off prosperity and the conditions that allow for it.
The Republicans are right to fight this tendency at every turn, for it represents a radical attack on all things truly American. Worse still, by playing with the printing presses, the policy tendency here is also deeply dangerous. It could destroy the dollar internationally and domestically, igniting a hyperinflation that no one will be able to control once it gets going. One only wishes that the Republicans had been so principled when their president was in charge!
The Obama administration says that we have to give the stimulus time to work. No need. The stimulus will not work. If we manage to pull ourselves out of this slump, it will be despite and not because of this stimulus package.
When putting together my book, I wondered which threat was actually more dangerous for us, the Right or the Left. I’m still not sure, for national socialism and international socialism are in close competition. I ended up focusing on both. It’s a hard truth for Americans to face that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.
Regards,
Llewellyn Rockwell
LewRockwell.com
February 18, 2009
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Mr. Rockwell is spot on here. The title of his book is also better considered than was Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which merely guaranteed that the people who most needed to read it (and it was a fairly good book) wouldn’t touch it with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole.
Llewellyn Rockwell’s piece in today Wiskey and Gunpowder is interesting in its contrasts of the Conservative Right and the last eight years of the Bush Administration and the Liberal Left and the early days of the Obama Administration. He makes some very scary points: The Right and the Left are both threats to Liberty. The Team in Washington (both during the previous administraion and this administration) is not looking out for the Liberty of US Citizens. The Citizens themselves must guard their own liberty. That said, what is the hope for the future of the USA or is there no hope? While it is easy to critize based on ideology, it if far more difficult to come up with constructive and actionable solutions. How can the American People collectively take back their Government and get it operating for the good of the people, ie. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? If the State isn’t the solution, what is the solution? I believe in Small Government, Free Enterprise and Free Market Capitalism, and Individual Freedoms (Responsible Liberty), but I also know from my own life experience that those in power do not give up there power willingly and that the will of the people is not necessarily achieved through our election processes nor carried out by those elected by that process. I am inclined to conclude that our government is broken and out of control but I have heard that rhetoric from both the right and the left during our election cycle. And, like other election cycles, when they are over, nothing really changes! I hope that the book offers some suggestions on reasonal and actionable corrective actions!
I am sorry but how was Bush a conservative o wait he wasn’t nice doubling of the debt George . All the money being spent now is a carry over from Bush’s failed policy’s and if McCain was in office I am sure he would be doing the same thing. The only hope we had was Ron Paul a person so radical to both the right and left he did not stand a chance. I still would prefer a smart thinking man as opposed to someone who is so sure they are right they don’t listen to anyone but their own ideologues . I will take 10 Clinton’s to one Bush any day of the week.
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An anarchist in liberal clothing……
Hes not all in all wrong but what he doesn’t seem to realize is that liberty is a relational concept. Minus the state in either it’s left or right variety as an institutionalized force of order limiting our actions we would never speak of liberty. This is always the anarchists reply to the left and right. Problem is most of us will accept some form of authority/order because we know we need it to think and act at all. Without structure/order in some form we would have neither science nor society. It’s simply to easy to use liberty as a way to critique both the left and right without suggesting some alternative. And besides which his willingness to jump from redistribution of income to the gulag in analyzing the left is insane its like equating every liberal from now until the end of time with Fellatio because of Clinton’s indiscretions.
I’m new to this site. My brother said it’s one of his, and it wasn’t on my list, so I decided to check it out.
I wondered if this article was supposed to be humor, at least from this:
“What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas! Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools.”
Who needs roads! Let the bridges crumble. Heck, no one likes having to go to school; we don’t need no steenking education. – -???
And portraying Obama as a leftist — the whacko right and those still deluded by hope think of Obama as “let wing.” But he’s got a team of the same old people we had before, which Karl Rove of all people praised as ensuring continuity! He’s not going to shrink the military but enlarge it, adding Afghanistan and more places to the buildup of US Military forces in the Middle East.
You’re right that he’s acting just like the last administration, throwing money around in large amounts. The bankers began that swindle under Goldman Sachs personnel, and they’re continuing it under the same tutelage.
So, no, there IS NO SUCH THING as a “conservative” in the sense of “fiscal conservative” any more. Except maybe Ron Paul, who says some discomfortingly accurate things about the Federal Reserve. Obama, like the Bushies before him, just LOVES the Fed. He pretends it’s part of government.
He took Rahm Emanuel on as chief of staff, which pleases AIPAC no end. And Hillary is no beacon of light for leftwing causes herself. She has been pro-war in her voting, and just said “oh well” regarding China’s human rights behavior; she’s said she’s not going to let a little thing like that get in the way of the important negotiations.
This country has gotten so fascist that a 1980s republican, if you’d got one in stasis and woke him up, would look like a “leftie” to everyone he explained his political views to.
“Socialism” does not mean “giving money to the rich” even if you do it by giving it to bankers and large corporations. shovelling public money into the pockets of financiers, as bonuses or (MUCH worse) to ‘make them whole’ on the bad bets they made in derivatives. That’s something called “socialzing the costs/privatizing the benefits.” It is a VERY right-wing/fascist thing to do. It is not socialism.
Robin Hood was a proto-socialist, maybe. This is reverse Robin Hood — to give to the rich, by stealing from the poor, AKA business as usual. What’s new is the breathtaking scale of it: Trillions of dollars to try to bail out trillions in the deleveraging derivatives bubble.
But spending money on bridges and roads and schools — THAT is a problem???
How much do you have to hate the very concept of civilization to say that?
Doug,
It isn’t Clinton or Bush (senior) it is Bush/Clinton. Old man Bush was Clintons mentor and sponsor into the Washington Establishment via the CFR (the shadow government of the United States) when he was its president. The CFR was created by the Bankers to condition the American people for their New World Order. Wilson after WW I could not get the US to join the League of Nations the planned One World Government. This was 1920 when they also bought all of the key influential media to create their Central Bankers Ministry of Truth. They needed time to solidify Communist control of Russia which they financed and finance Hitler to create the plausible, best enemy we could create and buy. Don’t forget that Russia and Germany and Japan were allies and were mutually controlled by the Sorge Spy ring ind the highest councils of Germany and Japan. They reported to Stahlin as did Alger Hiss personal assistant to FDR. This was part of the process of taking Eastern Europe (Germany and Russia invaded Poland together) then the mass and masses of Asia next we will take that last bastion of capitalism, America. We will not have to invade her for she will fall into our hands like an overripe fruit. Overripe is rotting — what are we going into now and why. Surprise!!! Commie Bankers and their government minions. They are not stupid, It only requires a stupid potential victim to become an actual stupid victim. Yes Dougie our leaders have Handlers.
The comment I would like to make here is in regards to the Bush and Cheney administration. The article
above mentions the Far Right under Bush being about nationalism. Well, contrare..contrare!! They just
gave the appearance of nationalism when what their agenda was about was actually globalism with a
capital G, which my dear friends leads ultimately to slavery and tyranny of the masses, as well as our com-
plete loss of freedom. Just look at all the elements of the Constitution that have been done asunder under
the Bush & Cheney administration. In fact, that phoney “Patriotic Act” wasn’t about patriotism at all. That
was the biggest lie of them all. The NSA had carte blanche to our bank accounts, e-mails, phone lines,
computer records, etc. all in the name of terrorism and patriotism. BULL!!!!!!! This is BIG BROTHER like
in the book “1984″ snooping into every element of our lives. In fact, Bush & Cheney used “terrorism” to
terrorize the citizens with while taking all our privacy away. The real terrorists are those involved with the
Illuminati, the Bilderberger group. and the whole globalist agenda.
Right now, they are taking over our entire banking system and I bet very few people realize this. Four banks
now own 61% of all the mortgages now: Chase/J.P. Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.
All four of these are owned and controlled by the top Illuminati families in the world such as the Rockefellers
and the Rothschilds.
Wake up folks! They’re in the closing round of shutting down and collapsing our dollar to take full control of
our money supply. Fight everything to do with the globalists and the globalists’ agenda!!
Mr. Rockwell has many good thought-provoking ideas to talk about. However by focusing on the parties (which we can all agree are the tool of our incremental destruction) he’s missing a much simpler critical flaw with our government–and that is the patent failure of the Supreme Court, over the last ~100 years, to strictly enforce our Constitution when it comes to its limitations of the federal government. Without the gross neglect of our third branch of government, there could be no Federal Reserve, no Dept. of Education, no War on Drugs or Poverty, etc. The Supreme Court is supposed to be the check against all of these misuses of “general welfare” and “interstate commerce” clauses but they have not. They’ve been silent or complicit–making our most critical founding document a relative issue to be interpreted according to the prevailing opinions of society. Where’s the outrage against this gang of seven?
“And portraying Obama as a leftist — the whacko right and those still deluded by hope think of Obama as “let wing.” But he’s got a team of the same old people we had before, which Karl Rove of all people praised as ensuring continuity! He’s not going to shrink the military but enlarge it, adding Afghanistan and more places to the buildup of US Military forces in the Middle East.”
No one needs to “portray” Obama as a leftist. It’s painfully obvious just from observing him.
“Who needs roads! Let the bridges crumble. Heck, no one likes having to go to school; we don’t need no steenking education. – -???”
Funny how we keep pouring money into the educational system, and yet our children do worse and worse. Could it be that the teacher’s unions supported by Obama are wasting our money? Rhetorical question.