If you’re of the millennial generation and even slightly left of center, liberals and the Democratic Party have been the only game in town as long as you’ve been alive. Your parents most likely protested the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movement, and have been patting themselves on the back ever since. But the litany of bold, progressive legislation liberals always point to is at least thirty years old, and it’s been eroded by both Republican and Democratic governments since. All those great liberal achievements have been systematically dismantled both by the Right—who’ve made such destruction their mission—and Democrats and liberals themselves, who believe they have to “innovate” their ideas and move to the center to win elections.
(Yes, yes, we know that liberal and Democrat are not actual synonyms. But by the time of FDR, the party’s central leadership was liberal. And with LBJ, it had generally become the liberal party, while the Republican Party shed all its John Lindsays and Ed Brookes and fully blossomed into a pulsating, Jesse Helms–shaped blob.)
Your parents likely considered themselves pretty radical when they were your age. They were known to enjoy “good vibrations,” solid wages backed by union power, a college education that cost a nickel, and the ability to go to the doctor without selling their car to pay for it. But since those days, America has jerked to the right, and so liberals had to do the same in order to win elections and keep the country from moving further right!
This is the basic liberal mantra, and it’s fitting that it takes the form of an excuse. Its end result is a political system irrevocably weighted toward the forces of reaction. Coincidentally, by almost every metric, you are poorer and your life is more precarious than your parents’ were at a similar age. Get over it, snowflake; this book is your participation trophy.
Unfortunately, the eternal wimp-out shows no signs of slowing down. These days, there are two kinds of liberals: those who vote for Democrats because the alternative is worse, and those who get teary-eyed at the thought of supporting Cory Booker or some similarly phony slug. The latter are just moderate Republicans and should be written off completely. The former deserve better but probably have some misplaced attachment to the political tradition of “standing up” to the right wing. These poor souls can be spared the Chapo Reeducation Center (with our patented Lib-ovico Treatment), but only if they have imbibed the lessons and history laid out in this chapter and inform on their parents to the Chapo Central Committee.
We’re Only Kind of Evil: Libs throughout American History
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Much of the American history you learned in your ACLU-funded madrassa would have you believe that America was founded by a mix of religious zealots, genocidal frontiersmen, and slave owners. That history is correct. However, it ignores the fact that for every ten rugged, conservative types you read about, there was at least one dainty tattletale willing to make a stand for peace, justice, and compromise. We don’t know much about these men and women because they utterly failed to achieve either peace or justice in the blood-dimmed tide of American history.
But this tradition lives on today—for example, in the words of Uncle Joe Biden, who in fall 2017 laid down this wisdom: “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
People like Biden have been present all through history. Despite not always having a word for their beliefs, these brave souls were early ancestors of the modern American liberal. Let us now take a brief trip through time and shed light on some history even Howard “Big Dick” Zinn probably didn’t tell you about.
Bell, Cory Booker, and Candle
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In colonial New England, most people’s lives were defined by hard work, NoFap, and an austere Puritanical religion that offered scant opportunity for undoing the belt on your hat and having a good time. Perhaps the only moment a good Pilgrim could get a bit loose was during one of the periodic outbreaks of mass hysteria that would crop up whenever a dairy cow’s milk went sour, a goat looked weird, or a widow stood to inherit any amount of property. Agents of the devil were afoot. In the sweep of witch fever across seventeenth-century Massachusetts, one can see the stirrings of an early form of American liberalism: those who sought to reform the badly outdated witch-identifying standards and practices of their communities. Towns like Salem, Ipswich, and others were unfortunately stuck in Calvinism 1.0, badly in need of better data on women seeking congress with the devil.
Social reformers emerged from these dark, narrow New England glens to champion “reality-based” witch trials: Men like Abstinence True-Facts and Josias Goodmen-Project pushed back against the pervasive ignorance and prejudice of their time, fighting for higher standards of evidence, as well as more humane punishments for those convicted of consorting with the dark side, such as the right to be burned at the stake by a mob of your peers. They engaged in spirited and respectful debate with the social conservatives of their day, men like Joseph Glanvill and Cotton Mather. Indeed, True-Facts and Goodmen-Project defended famous witch trial defendant Sarah Good on the grounds that the spectral evidence introduced against her was procured illegitimately. They issued scathing takedowns of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World for being improperly footnoted.
Unfortunately, Good was executed anyway, and for their brave stand for the rule of law, science, and human rights, both men were prosecuted and covered with stones until their bodies were crushed. It’s rumored that Goodmen-Project’s last words to the Court of Oyer and Terminer were, “Thou art not aware of how most foule thou appeareth at this moment.”
For these early American libs, being crushed to death by stones was a small price to pay for being on the right side of history. By insisting that more than one eyewitness was needed to confirm a sighting of an apparition, these bleeding-heart Puritans helped save the lives of countless women who would have otherwise been lost to shoddy or, at times, completely unfounded accusations of getting head from Beelzebub.
Our Revolution
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In the lead-up to the American Revolution, relations between the thirteen colonies and Britain were strained by the issue of the Crown’s aggressive taxation. With the passage of the Stamp Act, enraged patriot groups, such as the Sons of Anarchy, took up “No taxation without representation” as a rallying cry. At the same time, lesser-known nationalist groups like the Project for an Independent America (PIA) also organized around the issue of taxation, but unlike the scruffier roving patriot gangs, the PIA actually wanted more taxation to pay for charter apprenticeships and programs to teach children to tie complicated sailor’s knots, the eighteenth-century equivalent of coding.
Emphasis on “Civil” War
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The greatest liberal icon of the first half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Henry Clay, fittingly known as the “Great Compromiser” for his preternatural ability to bring both sides together. Clay understood that at the end of the day, everyone—Whig or Democrat, slave owner or abolitionist, Irishman or human—was a white male landowner and ought to put their differences aside and come together over a cup of switchel to hash out pragmatic policies that would work for every member of the ruling class. To that end, Clay designed the Compromise of 1850, a package of reforms he helped pass by telling Southerners, “If you like your slaves, you can keep them.” Clay’s Compromise stands as a towering achievement for radical moderation and centrism that managed to postpone a bloody Civil War for just under decade.
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During the prelude to the Civil War, proto-liberals began to solidify their identity and soundly supported the cause of abolition. However, they were still wary of opposing the evil institution too vociferously, lest they become the very thing they hated. Ever vigilant for ways to demonstrate their moral su
periority, Civil War libs sent around a collection plate to raise funds for the damage done to Harpers Ferry by the radical extremist John Brown, preaching, “This is not who we are.” In a last-ditch effort to bring the Southern states back into the Union, libs put forth the Crittenden Compromise, a bold piece of bipartisan legislation mandating that the Constitution could never be amended to end slavery, and in exchange slaves would receive tariff credits they could use to buy their freedom after sixty years of labor.
After the war, Southern whites protested Reconstruction by requesting taverns and general stores take their orders for corn pone and gingham skirts under the names “General Lee” and “Nathan Bedford.” Reconstruction-era libs responded by buying more cornpone and gingham. The Compromise of 1877 was another landmark of civil moderation: on the one hand, it prevented Democrat Samuel J. Tilden from winning the presidency, and on the other hand, the antebellum slave-owning aristocracy regained total political control of the South, engaged in violent repression of freedmen, reinstalled the institution of slavery in all but name, and perpetuated a racial crisis that would last for the next 141 years and counting—so, win-win. One can picture the ancestors of today’s libs standing by, hands over hearts.
Spread the Gild Around
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The rapid consolidation of capital that followed the Civil War put American industrialization into overdrive, spraying mechanized jets of diarrhea into the faces of average Americans. For some reason, very few people—be they former yeoman farmers driven from their land by collapsing commodity prices or immigrants seeking new lives in the New World—were thrilled with the deal offered by the rising robber-baron class: short, miserable lives spent toiling in mills, factories, and mines in exchange for twice-weekly ice deliveries to their hovels. Riots and strikes exploded in the last decades of the nineteenth century as laborers sought to reduce the danger and drudgery of their work and increase their wages, or at least to jack those ice deliveries up to three times a week.
Liberals of a rising middle class responded by forming the Progressive movement, which ushered in the uncreatively named Progressive Era.
The Progressives sought to soothe the anger and militancy of the restive working class by placing government restrictions on industry. Sure, they took up the demands for eight-hour workdays, safety regulations, and the end of child labor that workers had been making for years and brought them to the seat of power. But they added their own uniquely liberal policy prescriptions as well. After all, what good would it be to lighten the workload of common laborers if their culture of victimhood and laziness persisted? In order to take advantage of the many exciting new job tracks in the fast-changing industrial economy (powder monkey, gear gibbon, axle ape, coal eater), workers would have to cultivate the bourgeois values of thrift and diligence.
Thankfully, Progressives conceived of a smart policy that would nudge the teeming urban hordes into lives of rewarding employment: eugenics. By pairing up the most intelligent and physically robust of the laboring classes and using nimble public-private partnerships to permanently dissuade the less competitive from procreating, desirable cultural traits and skull shapes would be passed along to future generations as less-desirable ones perished. It was a win for taxpayers, who wouldn’t have to foot the bill for jugs of liquor and frayed overalls; a win for employers, who could count on a ready supply of well-bred workers; and especially a win for the congenitally undesirable workers themselves, who could bust nuts without fear of consequence.
The policy received a seal of approval from the US Supreme Court in 1927 when liberal lion Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled in Buck v. Bell that state eugenics programs were constitutionally permissible. Holmes famously said, “Three generations of morons is enough,” in his decision, a statement that would go on to be the slogan for ABC’s TGIF lineup in the 1990s. The ruling coincidentally came just a month before Justice Holmes announced the opening of his own chain of “Uncle Ollie’s Snip ’n’ Clip” mandatory vasectomy clinics.
Hey La! Hey La! We Stand Tall: FDR
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The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began at the height of a major crisis of capitalism. During his historic inauguration speech, FDR famously declared “Fear ain’t for me” and that he wasn’t “into that foo-foo lame shit.” The Roosevelt years smashed the record for consecutive presidential administrations and drove the pace car for twentieth-century American liberalism.
At a time when democracy was looking a bit worn-out compared to hot new trends like fascism and Communism, FDR’s “Art of the Deal” set up a new, centralized state to not only manage the excesses of capitalism but also to project American power across the globe. It was an ambitious undertaking that sought to stave off a more radical politics creeping into society from the left: the president and his minions saw Communists unionizing black sharecroppers in the South and organizing sit-down strikes in the heart of Fordism and nervously proposed, “Hey, how about some, uh, public works projects and murals showing superjacked workers popping their biceps?”
The good things that came out of the New Deal: unions, regulation of capital, massive investment in infrastructure, Social Security, seizing people’s dumbass gold, dams, street art, and two-for-one happy hours. The bad thing: black people were excluded from pretty much all of it. FDR’s administration systematically upheld white supremacy and segregation as a way to get the votes it needed from Southern Democratic politicians. (Also bad: Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, Japanese Americans were sent to Camp Grenada, during World War II.)
And so, New Deal reforms ameliorated the worst of the Great Depression, but it took the completely top-down, centrally planned economy necessitated by waging total war against the Axis powers to fully end the Depression.
Postwar Consensus: Winter Warz
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The Kennedys’ Camelot is considered by many libs to be the high-water mark of postwar American liberalism. It’s the administration every subsequent Democratic presidency is consciously and unconsciously compared to: a matinee-idol president with charisma, a pinch of exotic ethnicity (in 1960, many Americans still thought Catholics were a type of bipedal goat), and a cabinet full of Ivy League smarty-pantses. These were the people who would drag Eisenhower’s stodgy, mothballed America across the New Frontier.
The Kennedy regime was in fact so bold and so beautiful that they bungled and equivocated on civil rights, steered America directly into the future bloodbath of Vietnam, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stood ready to nuke the earth to a crisp if one Russian submarine commander hadn’t slept in that morning. For all liberalism’s bragging about “getting things done,” the only person who really got anything done during the Kennedy years was a young Marxist go-getter named Lee Harvey Oswald.
With that distraction out of the way, the rest of the sixties blew up all the contradictions of capitalism just as our country was finally gearing up to become a gay, latte-sipping social democracy. This was a time when America, fat and rich after World War II, took on huge deficits and propped up European and Japanese markets to lock down a global order of liberal capitalism. America was spraying gasoline everywhere, shouting, “My money’s real good.”
At the height of its power, America got a leader with a massive hog to match our massive empire: his name was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he called his penis “Jumbo.” I
Society Is Already Great
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Despite being an egomaniacal, racist, Foghorn Leghorn man from Texas, Johnson was also a onetime schoolteacher who cared deeply about solving poverty. Through his dialectical synthesis of both tough guy and carelord, LBJ was shaping up to be the most powerful liberal politician who ever lived, eclipsing even Roosevelt (who was a bro, after all). Swept into office after a national tragedy, Johnson used his first inaugural address to call for a bold progressive agenda—not just a good society, mind you, but a Great Society. In an epic stem-winder brimming with biblical allusions and rich barnyard analogies,
Johnson rallied his Congress and his country behind civil rights, a war on poverty, health care reform, robust public education, and the inalienable right of every human being, regardless of race, color, or creed, to say the n-word.
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But the contradictions of liberalism forced Johnson to trip over his mighty wang just as things were getting started, in a turn that would cannibalize the Democratic Party and end America’s long liberal epoch: namely, the gory vortex of Vietnam. Technically, it was Eisenhower who initiated our presence there, but JFK deepened it, and LBJ positively juiced it. It wasn’t conservatives who gave us full-blown slaughter in Vietnam—it was a cabinet of educated, elite, enlightened white liberals. And despite all the obvious signs of doomsday, the lamentations from the Left, and the daily horror show on the ground, they got their war. They dumped Agent Orange on farmers defending their land; they ran genocidal search-and-destroy missions, of which My Lai was merely the most famous example; they propped up a series of corrupt military dictatorships; they took a shit on the 1956 Geneva agreement that would have unified the country peacefully; their soldiers raped; their officers tortured; and they dropped more bombs on Vietnam than they did on the entirety of Europe and Japan during World War II. This, as ever, was the liberal compromise position, as most of the American Right wanted to use nukes. In any case, we effectively wiped a whole country off the map.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 5