Tuesday, October 8, 2013
But seriously
If you want to know how we could have overturned the common sense understanding of human nature to allow gay marriage, just watch our illustrious leader weigh in on the great Redskin Crisis of the 21st Century. I mean, many Native Americans don't care, and some want it to stop. And yet that small, small, small - and I mean small - grain of sand sized group who demands change will get it. How? I leave that up to the good readers to figure. Just know that this trend, not of a group winning the hearts and minds of the masses, but appealing to key institutions of influence and power, is one that has come to define modern democratic processes. Especially by appealing to certain sensitivities. And one that does not bode well for the future.
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The answer is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nationalreview.com/corner/360464/progressives-power-jonah-goldberg
But here’s where I disagree a bit with Charlie. The key issue for progressives has never been the form power takes, but power itself. You want my five-second lesson in progressive history? No? Sucks for you, because I’m going to tell you anyway: They always go where the field is open.
That’s it.
When the public was on their side the progressives relied on the public. That’s why we have the direct election of senators. That’s why women got the franchise. Etc. In his early years as an academic Woodrow Wilson wanted Congress to run the country — the way parliament runs England — and relegate the president to a glorified clerk. When the public became unreliable and Congress was no longer a viable vehicle, progressives suddenly fell in love with a Caesarian presidency. Indeed, Wilson himself, the former champion of Congress, became an unapologetic voluptuary of presidential power the moment it suited him — and nary a progressive complained (save poor Randolph Bourne, of course). The progressives rode the presidency like it was a horse they never expected to return to a stable. And when that started to hit the point of diminishing returns, they moved on to the courts (even as they bleated and caterwauled about Nixon’s “abuses” of powers that were created and exploited by Wilson, FDR, and Johnson). After the courts, they relied on the bureaucracy. Like water seeking the shortest path, progressives have always championed the shortest route to social-justice victories.
...The only true standard is whatever advances the progressives’ ball downfield. That is the very heart of “social justice” — doing whatever “good” you can, when you can, however you can. As they say, behind every confessed double standard there is an unconfessed single standard. And for progressives, the single enduring standard is “whatever works for us.”
By now they're old hats at finding something, ANYTHING that will work for them.
Hah, and here's another quote that's relevant.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nationalreview.com/article/360692/obamacare-and-ratchet-effect-myth-jonah-goldberg
The relevant economist on this point isn’t Higgs but Mancur Olson, who argued that modern societies tend to produce interest groups (also known as lobbies) that undermine the public good for private gain. Virtually everyone wants to get rid of mohair subsidies, but almost no one cares about getting rid of them as much as the subsidy’s recipients care about keeping them. Large majorities of Americans oppose racial preferences, but few are willing to take on the activists — and journalists — eager to demonize critics of such policies. Head Start doesn’t work very well, but it’s politically immortal.
Which is why the government was originally built restrained and limited: to keep the fight from being worth it for interest groups.
Yeah. Good points there. My boy also hit it. This isn't being done by winning the hearts and minds of people. It's being done by threatening them with nasty names, and getting certain key institutions to back you up. Little in the way or representation there. A lot in the way of how to impose a small idea on the masses.
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