The plain facts of our nation’s history have not stopped anti-religious bigots in the judiciary, academia, and in elected office from insisting that religious belief is inherently divisive and that the discussion of public affairs can only occur in secular terms. Consider the oppressive effect of this secular worldview in our public schools:• School officials prevented a New Jersey student from reading his favorite story to the class because it came from the Bible.
• A Pennsylvania school suspended a teacher’s assistant because she wore a necklace with a cross.1
• A Colorado high school valedictorian was refused a diploma unless she apologized for mentioning Jesus in her commencement speech.2
Such absurdities, of course, hardly display the “tolerance” that the Left claim to value above all else. And recent court cases are even more disturbing:• A federal court in California found that the leasing of parcels of parkland to the Boy Scouts was unconstitutional. While the case was stayed pending a related decision, the fact that the plaintiffs were found to have standing to bring the suit, in the words of six dissenting judges on the Ninth Circuit, “creates a new legal landscape in which almost anyone who is offended by anything has standing to air his or her displeasure in court.”3
• The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is arguing on behalf of a parks service employee to remove the 76-year-old World War I Memorial Cross in the Mojave National Preserve.4 The cross has been covered with a plywood box until the Supreme Court decides the case. An organization I founded called Renewing American Leadership, headed by Rick Tyler, has filed an amicus brief along with Citizens United in support of maintaining the cross. To be clear, the Mojave cross is in the middle of the desert, eight and a half miles away from any major roadway. Imagine for a second the mindset of a militant secularist who is so terrified and offended by a cross in the middle of a desert.
• In DeFuniak Springs, Florida, a judge ordered that a copy of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse be covered during a murder trial because he did not want the jurors to see the commandment “Do not kill.”5
• In June 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2004 upon procedural grounds rather than on its merits. In early 2010 the issue was brought up again in the Ninth Circuit, and this time the court ruled in favor of keeping “under God.” Michael Newdow, the atheist behind this string of lawsuits, has vowed to appeal the ruling.6
The wall of separation these secularists seek to enforce is really one between the historic America and the radically different America they want to create—an America without God, traditional values, or knowledge of its own history.
SOCIALISM: SPREADING THE FAILURE AROUND
Describing the Left as socialist will also be controversial because the Left hate accurate language about their goals. But any fair assessment of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid economic policies shows they are indisputably socialist.
Broadly defined, socialist policies favor increased central planning of the economy by politicians and bureaucrats instead of allowing entrepreneurs, businesses, and customers to make decisions in the free market. Socialists also favor government attempts to collectivize the means of production and to divvy up the national wealth. Socialists favor these methods because they insist on equality of results, rather than the traditional American belief in equality under the law. Therefore, they champion a strong central government to impose equality of outcomes, as Joe the Plumber found out during the 2008 campaign when he was told by then-candidate Obama that taxes needed to be raised in order to “spread the wealth around.”
It’s hard to imagine, but as late as the 1970s, before the Reagan revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism had not yet been thoroughly discredited in the United States. Meanwhile, conservatism, while growing in force, was not yet the dominant ideology in America or even in the Republican Party. American politics was stuck in a cycle arguing between slower and faster routes toward big government. Favoring the fast route, many Democratic Party leaders sought to impose a form of socialism on America.
With that in mind, it’s important to recognize that most of today’s powerful Democratic congressional committee chairmen were first elected in the 1970s. In other words, today’s Democratic leaders joined Congress at a time when socialist, big-government solutions were in the mainstream in their party.
Coupled with the current Speaker of the House, who is a legitimate representative of the left-wing values of her home district in San Francisco, is it any wonder the new Democratic majorities have aggressively pursued big-government, socialist policies?
Look at the signature bills considered by the House and Senate under President Obama, the committee chairmen responsible for their development, and when these chairmen were elected to Congress.
• The Employee Free Choice Act (Education and Labor Committee: Chairman George Miller, 1974) Last year, the House passed the EFCA card check legislation that would strip American workers of the right to a secret ballot when deciding whether to join a union. It would also institute “binding arbitration” that takes power away from U.S. employers and employees and gives it to new arbitration bureaucracies. The political rationale for this bill is that unions—long-time power centers of the global socialist movement and a powerful Democratic constituency—have been shrinking in size and influence over the past fifty years (with the notable exception of public employee unions). This bill is a clear attempt to reinvigorate them with new powers, even if workers don’t agree.
• Cap and Trade (Energy and Commerce Committee: Chairman Henry Waxman, 1974; Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee: Chairman Edward Markey, 1976) The House passed a huge energy tax increase on the American people in the guise of a cap-and-trade scheme. The bill would concentrate the authority to choose the recipients of carbon permits—and by extension, the power to determine which U.S. firms will be allowed to produce, innovate, and grow—into a centralized bureaucracy. This is clearly a step toward central economic planning.It’s also worth noting that the Senate’s failure to pass this bill has provoked threats from the Obama administration to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon as a pollutant, a move that would centralize economic power in bureaucracies even more than cap and trade would have done. Additionally, the Copenhagen Conference on global warming produced a commitment from participants, including the United States, to initiate a vast transfer of wealth from developed nations to poor ones. It’s socialism on a global scale.• Stimulus Bill (Appropriations Committee: Chairman Dave Obey, 1969) Congress circumvented the normal appropriations process and hastily passed this convoluted legislation that mandated which agencies, firms, and individuals would (and, implicitly, would not) receive taxpayer dollars. Five-hundred thirty-five individuals exercised complete control over $787 billion in taxpayer funds. Another step toward centralized economic planning, the stimulus has only sent a fraction of the money to “shovel ready” infrastructure and other jobs projects. Far more has gone into state and federal bureaucracies, perhaps irreversibly growing the size and power of government at the federal, state, and local level.
• Healthcare Overhaul (Energy and Commerce Committee: Chairman Henry Waxman, 1974; Ways and Means Committee: Chairman Charles Rangel, 1970; Education and Labor Committee: Chairman George Miller, 1974; Senate Finance Committee: Chairman Max Baucus, 1978) The healthcare bill signed into law in March 2010 will turn healthcare into a de-facto nationalized utility by forcing all Americans to buy health insurance and micromanaging insurance companies from the Department of Health and Human Services. Fortunately, many of the most destructive elements of this bill do not take effect until 2014, so there is still time to repeal it and start over with market-based, patient-oriented health reform.
With this 1970s-era cohort in charge, it’s unsurprising the major legislation passed by this Congress has increased centralized economic planning. Anoth
er example is the government takeover of General Motors, engineered by a “car czar” who is not subject to congressional approval.
And then there’s the Left’s redistribution of taxpayer money for massive housing subsidies through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing,” said Democratic congressman Barney Frank in 2003. Of course, this gamble helped spark the housing crash, but that hasn’t stopped the Left. In fact, in December 2009, the Obama administration lifted the $400 billion cap on Treasury funding to Fannie and Freddie, a big step toward nationalizing the home loan market.
For these archaic, left-wing Democrats, their return to power with the Democratic House and Senate majorities of 2007, along with the 2008 election of a new, left-wing president, is their last chance to achieve their dream of instituting socialism in America.
The policies of the Left are clearly socialist. They would have government define and dominate every aspect of energy production in America. They would have government define and dominate healthcare—one-sixth of the U.S. economy. (The first healthcare overhaul bill to pass the House gave the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to unilaterally reduce benefits, increase premiums, and establish waiting lines for high risk patients.) They have taken over AIG, America’s largest insurer. They took over General Motors and Chrysler. They dominate banking. They have a “pay czar” in the White House to dictate salaries at ostensibly private companies. These actions are consistent with a socialist vision of America where the government defines and dominates the private sector.
WHY THE SECULAR-SOCIALIST LEFT HAS TO LIE
If you are a political candidate with unpopular secular-socialist beliefs, you simply cannot be candid about what you want to accomplish. Therefore, secular socialists learn very early they have to misinform and mislead in order to get elected.
Additionally, if you’re a secular socialist, you have to maintain your power in ways the public inherently dislikes: paying off supporters by putting earmarks in appropriations bills; holding secret conferences to write bills; making absurd deals to pick up enough votes to pass legislation; and appointing really bizarre people to top government jobs. You learn to hide what you are doing, deny what you are doing, and if caught, try to deceive the people about what you’ve done.
Finally, if you’re part of a movement that believes it knows better than the American people what’s best for them, you inherently scorn the values and judgment of the people you intend to change. Since the vast majority of Americans have the “wrong” values and the “wrong” attitude, they have to be misled into voting for the enlightened elite who will remake them into the right attitudes and the right values.
Thus, in order to achieve its historic mission of transforming America, the secular-socialist movement must resort to dishonesty in communicating with the American people.
ALINSKY’S RULES FOR DISHONESTY
Perhaps nobody has been more clear about the Left’s need for dishonesty than Saul Alinsky.
One of the twentieth century’s most influential radicals, Alinksy is considered the godfather of community organizing. His two most famous works, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, were published in the late sixties and early seventies. In these works, Alinsky draws a distinction between meek, garden-variety liberals and brave, revolutionary radicals. “While liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues,” Alinsky writes, “radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.”
Many of his “rules” are guidelines for engaging in immoral, dangerous, political dishonesty. Echoing the maxims of Vladimir Lenin, the architect of Soviet Communism, Alinsky justifies almost any immoral act, especially outright dishonesty and hypocrisy, if it’s done while pursuing revolution. Alinksy writes, “[The organizer] does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”
David Horowitz, in his small book Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, cogently explains the significance of Alinsky’s teachings to the modern Left.7 In particular, he cites what he calls the “most important” chapter in Rules for Radicals, “Means and Ends,” whose “rules” include the following:• “In war the end justifies almost any means.”
• “Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.”
• “The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluation of means.”
• “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” (Later, Alinsky discusses the Communist Leon Trotsky’s summation of Lenin’s speeches: “They have the guns and therefore we are at peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”)
For Alinsky, a radical’s primary goals must be acquiring power and destroying the current system. What replaces it is of secondary concern. He teaches that you amass power by organizing people based on their naked self-interest, not on any idealism or common vision for the future. In fact, he argues that clearly naming or describing such a vision—and spelling out clearly how to get there—only alienates some people and therefore divides your potential power base.
Now consider Alinksy’s eleventh rule of Means and Ends:Goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty,” “Equality,” “Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” or “Bread and Peace.” Whitman put it: “The goal once named cannot be countermanded.” It has been previously noted that the wise man of action knows that frequently in the stream of actions of means toward ends, whole new and unexpected ends are among the major results of the action.8
“Change We Can Believe In” fits nicely into that list of bromides. Horowitz aptly sums up Alinsky’s teachings:In contrast to liberals, who in Alinsky’s eyes are constantly tripping over their principles, the rule for radicals is that the ends justify the means. This was true for the Jacobins, for the Communists, for the fascists and now for the post-Communist left. . . . The very nature of this future [they desire]—a world without poverty, without war, without racism, and without “sexism”—is so desirable, so noble, so perfect in contrast to everything that exists as to justify any and every means to achieve it.
. . . The German philosopher Nietzsche had a phrase for this: “Idealism kills.” And of course, the great atrocities of the modern era, whether Nazi or Communist, were committed by people who believed in a future that would save mankind.9
If you think it’s unfair to hold the current leaders of the Democratic Party responsible for the teachings of a deceased left-wing radical, consider that in his early days in Chicago, Barack Obama taught courses on Alinsky’s techniques for community organizing groups. So his endorsement of these tactics of fundamental dishonesty is a matter of a public record.
President Obama’s own website displayed a picture of a younger Obama teaching in a Chicago classroom. On the chalkboard behind him are written the phrases “Power Analysis” and “Relationships Built on Self Interest.”
In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Republic, Obama said, “The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self-interest was met, and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.”
Saul Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinksy, writing in the Boston Globe, marveled at how many of his father’s methods were evident at the Democratic National Convention. It was clear, he wrote, that “Obama learned his lesson well.”10
THE PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE
Another primary weapon in the secular-socialist arsenal is the deliberate misuse of language. George Orwell, one of the most insightful analysts of tyranny and politics in the first half of the twentieth century, explained the danger of corrupted language in “Politics and the English Language.” In that brilliant ess
ay, Orwell warns, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” He explains,
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”
When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.11
Remember Orwell’s warning the next time you listen to a secular-socialist politician, academic, or TV analyst employ euphemisms and other rhetorical tricks that allow them to avoid calling things by their proper names. Consider these examples:• The “Employee Free Choice Act” strips the right to a secret ballot for workers voting on whether to join a union, exposing them to coercion tactics from union thugs, thus threatening their freedom to choose.
• The Obama administration announced it would refer to terrorist attacks as “man-made disasters” and the war on Islamic terrorists would be called “overseas contingency operations.”
To Save America Page 5