Who Are These People?
by Charles Stone, Jr.
canam@mpinet.net

Exclusive to TLE

They call themselves Democrats. They're not, at least not in the tradition of the Democratic Party of a century ago. The call themselves Liberals. They're not, at least not in the tradition of real classic liberals like John Locke, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. They call themselves "Progressives." They're not, unless you understand that "Progressive" is a code word they have adopted to cover their real agenda.

So, if they're not all those things, what are they?

Most of them don't really comprehend the complexities of politics. They define themselves as Liberal or Democrat because they have been brainwashed into believing that the Democrats are the party of the people and the Republicans are only interested in big business and grinding the little guy down.

They actually believe that a mediocre mid-Nineteenth century social critic named Marx was right after all and that the workers will someday take over the world.

They are statists who have undying faith in government as the answer to all of the world's problems. The Clinton's are outstanding examples.

I guess you have to take a look at what the neo-Liberal Democrats have accomplished with their half century of political power to figure out whether they are right or not.

They claim to be the party of the "minorities," the only ones who can help the disadvantaged secure their rightful place in society. If that's the case, why do they spend so much effort in keeping the minorities right where they are? Why do they excoriate any member of a minority group who has been successful, who has followed the American dream to success?

The truth is that in the Liberal Democrat lexicon, the terms "black" or "Latino" or "woman" are not defined by skin color or heritage or sex. They are defined by politics. Successful blacks like Clarence Thomas, successful Latinos like Miguel Estrada and successful women like Condaleeza Rice have lost their "minority" status because they aren't in agreement with Liberal Democrat political thinking. Minority groups are useful to Liberals because they are malleable and easily directed. Minority individuals are not useful because they are liable to go their own way and be less willing to subordinate their own aspirations to those of the party elite.

During the Lyndon Johnson administration, there was a program called the "War on Povety," a massive, overarching welfare system funded by the taxpayers and controlled by government bureaucrats. In the years since, at least as far as 1994, trillions (yes, with a "t") of taxpayer dollars have been spent on thousands of government programs yet the "poverty" rate today is higher than it was in the mid-'60s. Not a resounding success. The recently passed, so-called welfare reform won't help much either.

Liberal Democrats are also extraordinarily malleable in their political philosophy. In order to regain power they will invert many of their public pronouncements on fundamental issues to obscure their true goals. A case in point is their rabid anti-gun, anti Second Amendment stance. They have spent the last couple of decades ripping the NRA and Gun Owners of America, wailing about how the Second Amendment only applies to state militias and inventing the chimera of legal "loopholes" through which criminals buy untold numbers of hi-tech firearms. Unfortunately for them, most of the millions of gun owners in America are also voters, so the current Democratic tack is to back away from the strident criticism in an attempt to placate gun owners until after the elections. John Kerry has even bragged about the number of shotguns he owns.

They fought tooth and nail to pass a so-called "campaign finance reform" bill which would get the big corporate money out of politics. Then they found that under the new rules, they were the ones who lost the most. Many Democrats are now backing away from the whole "reform" idea. Neo-Lib billionaires are desperately seeking ways to funnel money to "politically acceptable" candidates.

A prime example of the neck-snapping philosophical reversals the Neo-Liberals are capable of is the aforementioned "welfare reform." Proposed by the Republicans, it was vetoed twice by Bill Clinton until he felt a shift in the political winds. Then he not only signed it but with the complicity of the mass media, he adopted it as his own and thereafter ranted mightily against the very people who had written the plan. Wow!

There is even a Democratic Senator who is raging against a proposal that would ban Internet taxes on the grounds that it goes against states rights. Democrats have been against states rights for decades but the lure of new taxes is impossible for them to resist.

If you want to see the real Liberal Democrat of today, you only have to look at the Marxists of yesterday. They know that socialism and communism are intellectually bankrupt philosophies so they camouflage themselves in the politically acceptable cloak of democracy. There are also the eco-nuts and tree-huggers who have moved from anti-capitalist enviromentalism into the equally anti-capitalist arms of Liberal Democracy.

Ther quality of the Liberal Democrats that is most troublesome, because it will grant them temporary power, is their patience. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are willing to use a whole series of small incremental victories over a long period of time to finally get the result they want. They spent forty years getting control of the major news media through having Leftist professors installed in the journalism and communications departments of nearly every American college and university. Then it was a simple matter of having news outlets require new hires to have college degrees and over time the Left-leaning came to populate the newsrooms from editor to cub reporter. Over 90% of the bureau chiefs and senior editors of northeastern media outlets vote Democratic.

They had similar persistence in their seizure of power in the government education system. Over the last half century the teacher's unions, wholly committed to Liberal Democrat goals and philosophy, have taken over the education system and now are the single most powerful labor union in the nation. That domination translates not only into votes for Democrat candidates but also sanctions the indoctrination of generations of young people in the ways of socialism and communism.

Another thing the Democrats have accomplished is a huge increase in the number of Americans who are dependent on government for their existence or who have been convinced that they must have government support to survive. Democrats want all elderly people, who vote more than any other age group, to depend on government for their income (Social Security), health (Medicare) and most recently prescription medicine (cleverly co-opted by the less than brilliant Republicans). Dependency is control.

As of 2002, the lower fifty percent of income earners pay only about three percent of the income taxes. Now the Neo-Libs want to have them relieved of the burden of Social Security contributions and the other so-called payroll taxes. With that many people having no effective federal tax liability, is it reasonable to expect them to vote against any Democrat tax-and-spend plan that will grant them benefits without cost? This too has been woven over the years by decades of Democrats in control of the federal purse strings.

Now the Republicans and others gape and stare and wonder how the Democrats have accumulated all this power. They did it because the Republicans were not bright enough to see what they were doing and even if they did notice, they were too hidebound by their own arrogance to understand what was happening.

They're still doing it today. Look at the problem George Bush has getting high profile judicial nominations brought to the Senate floor for a vote. The Democrats use a "rule" which has no grounding in the Constitution to require a sixty vote super-majority for acceptance of judicial nominations and the GOP is powerless. Of course, one of the problems the Republicans face is that they have used unusual tactics in the past to hold up Democratic nominees so they can't cast themselves as the poor, put-upon former minority party. The best weapon in their arsenal seems to have been a lame excuse for a filibuster that wasn't even good for a few laughs.

The Republicans don't seem to grasp just how single-minded the Democrat leaders are in their struggle to regain what they believe is their God-given right to control the White House and Congress. They will use any tactic, any weapon, any diversion, any chicanery, any treachery to get back their power because they sincerely believe that they and they alone are capable of running this nation. The plain fact that socialism has proved to be an abject failure everywhere it's been tried concerns them not a whit. They blithely say that previous efforts (like the Soviet Union) simply weren't the right kind of socialism, or were lead by the wrong people. Just give the neo-socialist intellectuals their heads and they'll show everybody how it should be done.

Look at who some of their leading lights are. You would think that the most driven, dedicated socialists would be poor people who have been beaten down by the system and are trying to bring about a better world for the working class. That's the scam they're running. The real leaders of the movement are wealthy people like Ted Turner, George Soros, Sheldon Drobny, John F. Kerry, the Kennedy clan and Bill Gates, Senior.

Soros is a particularly nasty piece of work. He lived through the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis and then the Communists yet he supports the Neo-Lib dream of a socialist paradise. It's amazing how a person who lived through dictatorial regimes and made a fortune by destabilizing national currencies can look to a centralized command structure as a viable form of government.

John Kerry portrays himself as a man of the people despite the hundreds of millions of dollars has married into, his yachts, mansions, airplanes and limos (actually his wife's). He has never had a real job yet he claims to understand the plight of the worker, he has never had to meet a payroll yet he fashions himself an expert on business.

Why would people of such immense wealth and power support a political philosophy that advances total egalitarianism, that denigrates individual success, that trumpets total belief in the dictatorship of the proletariat and excoriates the wealthy plutocrat?

It's simple. They know full well that any political structure will inevitably become hierarchical and in their arrogance, they still see themselves as being among the ruling elite. Soros probably pictures himself as a senior party commissar, lording it over the proles with political power the way he does today with his billions of dollars. You don't really believe Ted Turner sees himself as a factory hand in the new workers Paradise, do you? How about Ted Kennedy as a humble fisherman. (Of course, he may have a built in aversion to bodies of water). Can you picture John Kerry working in a burger joint? They support a socialist system because they don't believe they would have to live under it.

So, these are some of the folks who would like you to support them so they can run our nation. Who would have the guns and taxpayer money and the authority of law. They scare the Hell out of me, how about you?

© 2004 Charles Stone, Jr.