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.”
• Supporters of the cap-and-trade energy tax bill, which would cast a tangled web of new bureaucracies and regulations over our economy, say their bill is “marketdriven.”
• Supporters of the so-called “public option” in health insurance claimed it will introduce “competition,” even though more than 1,000 health insurance companies are already competing against each other in America. In reality, the public option would allow the government to gradually drive private insurers from the market altogether.
• President Obama claimed the stimulus bill had no “earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending.” This assertion, however, relies on an extremely narrow definition of an “earmark” as an outlay for a specific project or company. Although they cleverly avoided this level of specificity in the stimulus, Democrats packed the bill with spending on narrowly defined programs. For instance, in the $8 billion set aside for high speed railway, there was a specific outlay for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas maglev. There was also $1 billion for a zero emissions energy plant in Illinois, of which there was only one in development. These are earmarks in all but name—and everyone knows it, including President Obama.
HOW SECULAR SOCIALISM BUILDS THE MACHINE
It would be hard to overstate the degree to which the modern Left appeal to the self-interest of their various interest groups rather than to any sort of unifying vision for the future. There’s a reason for that: while secular socialism is the intellectual mindset of the left-wing party bosses and politicians, it is not the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. It would be impossible to build a governing majority around such an alien ideology.
But secular socialists know the bigger and more powerful government gets, the more politicians can use its power to benefit their supporters. In other words, secular socialism doesn’t win power because it’s a compelling vision for the future; it’s just a convenient way to pay off members of their coalition and bribe new ones into joining. And the more power secular-socialist politicians have, both in elected positions and in the bureaucracies, the better these coalition members can be fed from the public trough.
The secular-socialist machine is diverse. Trial lawyers are among the biggest donors to left-wing Democrats, who return the favor by preventing tort reform. This allows the lawyers to continue suing doctors and businessmen and women for huge sums of money that the lawyers then donate to left-wing Democrats.
Union bosses are another key machine component. They donate money to secular socialists from compulsory member dues and “encourage” their members to man phone banks and conduct get-out-the-vote operations. They expect their candidates, once in power, to change laws to give union organizers even more leverage against the businesses they are bankrupting, as well as to prevent reform of our union-dominated public bureaucracies, like education.
“Social justice” groups like the corrupt ACORN organization have received public dollars to perform voter registration drives that are really just operations to turn out voters for far-left Democrats, who gratefully steer more money toward groups like ACORN. Although ACORN’s long history of fraud has finally put it out of business, the group’s branches are now reorganizing to continue the same scam under new names.
And finally, big business hedges its bets by funding big-government supporters in both parties, hoping they will craft legislation that gives big business an advantage over its competitors.
There is one name for this kind of cynical cronyism and crass political manipulation: machine politics.
The way the Left govern in Sacramento, Albany, in many local governments, and especially in Washington is clearly indicative of a machine. When a $787 billion stimulus package can pass in days with no elected official having read the bill, it is evidence of a machine. When a 300-page amendment can be attached at 3:00 am to a bill passed at 4:00 that afternoon with no hearings and no amendments (the maneuver that bought enough votes to pass the Waxman-Markey energy tax), it is evidence of a machine. When 4,500 pages of healthcare bills affecting one-sixth of the economy are negotiated in secret, bypassing the normal open bill resolution process, it is evidence of a machine. When New York City mayor Bloomberg reports, as he did on Meet the Press, that no senators or congressmen he had talked with knew what was in the health bill they had voted for, it is clearly evidence of a machine.
Today, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Left are indisputably secular, they are socialist, and they operate as a machine. Therefore, “secularsocialist machine” is the most accurate way—in fact, the only accurate way—of describing the movement that now controls our government.
WHY SECULAR SOCIALISM NEEDS A MACHINE
Once the Left’s values and goals are clear, their secular-socialist agenda will be crushed in free and fair elections. To avoid this repudiation, they have to build a political machine that is too powerful to be defeated by popular anger. That is the Chicago model of “unrepresentative government.”
Union funding for politicians who will eliminate the right to a secret ballot when voting to form a union is a classic example of machine politics. This effort stems from the difficulty unions have had winning secret ballot elections in recent years. One solution would be to improve the union model so it could win secret ballot elections. But union leaders instinctively adopted a coercive strategy: eliminating secret ballots and relying on public commitments, which makes it easier to apply social pressure to coerce workers into joining unions.
Similarly, every test of voluntary payments to unions for political activism has resulted in a catastrophic drop in donations—as much as 96 percent in some cases. The unions’ answer: make the payments mandatory so people have to fork over the money to be in the union, and they have to be in the union to keep their job.
Similar kinds of social and economic coercion are found in other fields. In Hollywood, if you are openly on the Right you probably won’t get a job. And in many universities, conservatives will never get tenure.
This coercive brand of machine politics is the key to the Left’s attempts to gain power and remake the American people. The secular-socialist machine does not seek to serve the American people; it wants to force us into accepting the values and obeying the institutions of secular, big-government bureaucracies and their unionized employees.
WHY THE MACHINE HAS TO RELY ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SECULARISM
Transplanting secular-socialist values into people through government action requires a malleable view of human nature and a government-centric concept of citizens’ rights.
To socialists, people are inherently bad and capitalism is always exploitive. Only strong government can take money from the rich, give it to the poor, and reeducate the ignorant or misinformed through government-sponsored programs. (Read the education philosophies of Bill Ayers or John Dewey to understand the Left’s mania for incorporating public education into the secular-socialist machine.)
This socialist worldview is the exact opposite of our Founding Fathers’ outlook. As we’ve seen, the Founders believed our rights come from God, that our behavior should be shaped by a culture infused with religious values, and that government shoud be a carefully limited servant of the people.
A religious worl
dview inherently limits the purview of government. Even the concept of sin limits government by suggesting that external constraints of right and wrong should guide us no matter what the state says.
In short, our core religious values hinder the secular socialists from realizing a government-dominated, politician-defined world of limited citizenship and unlimited bureaucracy. Thus, the culture of secularism has to replace the culture of religion if socialism is to survive.
WHY SECULAR SOCIALISM IS CONDUCIVE TO DICTATORSHIP
For secular socialists, the government’s overarching goal is to condition people to accept alien behaviors and values. In practice, this outlook inherently produces creeping dictatorial bureaucracy and, ultimately, totalitarianism. George Orwell, despite being an avowed socialist, warned of this tendency in his essay “Why I Write”:
My recent novel [1984] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. . . . I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.12
For those who ridiculed warnings that “death panels” would accompany a government-run health system, Orwell should stand as a stark reminder that the expansion of government power may be a small step on the long march to tyranny and domination by bureaucrats and politicians.
In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek, an influential critic of centralized government and a major influence on President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, similarly warned that “[government] planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals.” He added, “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
Hayek clearly explains why the utopian fantasies of the secular-socialist machine are a direct threat to our freedom. Defeating this machine, and thwarting its furious attempts to impose alien values on us, is not a partisan matter between Democrats and Republicans; it’s an effort to save America.
CHAPTER THREE
The Lies They Told Us (Because They Had To)
How does the secular-socialist machine gain power? That’s easy: they lie to us.
But at some point in 2009, the American people realized they were not getting the truth from President Barack Obama, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
Perhaps it became clear in December during Congress’s first round of voting on healthcare “reform.” After an embarrassing and shocking parade of political payoffs to achieve the necessary votes, House and Senate leaders met with White House officials to draft a final bill.
President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid bypassed the normal conference committee for the bill, opting instead to hash out the details behind closed doors. There, they struck a corrupt deal with their union boss donors that would exempt union members from paying taxes on certain healthcare plans while non-union Americans would still get taxed.
Not only did this flagrant venality mock the very idea of equal protection under the law, but the process that created it was the polar opposite of the way President Obama and Speaker Pelosi had promised to govern.
When Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November 2006, Speaker Pelosi pledged, “This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”
They promised to give members of Congress—and the American people—twenty-four hours to review bills before voting on them, to conduct rigorous internal ethics investigations, and to reform the earmark process to stop taxpayer-financed political payoffs.
Similarly, candidate Obama passionately vowed to make Washington more bipartisan, more transparent, and more accountable to the American people. Condemning backdoor negotiations, he called for “bringing all parties together and broadcasting [healthcare] negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”
He made this pledge at least eight times during the campaign, and the pledges were compiled in an online video. In one clip, he explains that he is personally responsible for making this happen, insisting, “One of my jobs as President will be to guide this process.”
C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb asked congressional leaders to live up to those pledges so the American people could see how their representatives decide the vital issue of healthcare. But President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid refused. And no wonder; TV cameras would have exposed exactly the sort of corrupt bargaining on behalf of major political donors that candidate Obama had pledged to “shame”—his word—congressional leaders from making.
Thanks to that video, President Obama’s C-SPAN flip-flop may have been the most vivid example of the Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to uphold campaign promises, much less the ideals of this country. That instance of hypocrisy, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.
“THE MOST HONEST AND ETHICAL CONGRESS IN HISTORY”
Any honest assessment of the campaign promises made by the current Democratic Congress reveals a stunning gap between words and deeds. Despite the Democrats’ much-heralded promises of transparency, accountability, and higher ethical standards, the current Congress has featured unprecedented corruption and secrecy.
During Obama’s presidency, we have seen Democrats ram massive, complex legislation through the House and Senate and sign it into law so fast that members—as well as the American people—had no time to read it.
We’ve also seen Nancy Pelosi protect Democratic congressmen under criminal investigation. One such congressman, Charles Rangel from New York, who has taken a “leave of absence” from his position as head of the committee that writes our tax laws, is under an ethics committee investigation for alleged tax dodging, filing deficient financial disclosure forms, and other charges. Although the committee “admonished” him—its weakest reprimand—for taking corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, Pelosi declined to join many of her Democratic colleagues in calling for Rangel to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In fact, in an interview with ABC News’ This Week, Pelosi conceded that the admonishment of Rangel was “not good,” but stressed that Rangel’s actions were “not something that jeopardized our country in any way.” Is this the new ethical standard we were promised—that corruption is acceptable as long as it doesn’t “jeopardize” the country?
In fact, under the Democrats, we’ve seen the very apparatuses used to police ethics in Congress made more and more feckless. For example, even though they created the Independent Office of Congressional Ethics, the Democrats failed to give it subpoena power and have ignored its findings.
Meanwhile, under Democratic control, the ethics committee seems surprisingly eager to clear members of Congress of wrongdoing. The committee cleared two members of Congress who, according to the panel, tacitly tied requests for campaign donations to earmarks that would have benefited the donors. Five others—four congressmen and one delegate—who took the same Caribbean trips as Congressman Rangel were cleared after claiming they did not realize the trips were sponsored by corporations, even though they repeatedly took pictures in front of corporate logos. The ethics committee has even issued guidelines for congressmen on how to get around new rules that prohibit lobbyists from throwing parties in their honor: make sure the parties are honoring more than one member of Congress.
Most significant, in order to get President Obama’s initiatives approved in Congress, the Democratic leadership used the American people’s money to buy the votes of key senators and congressmen and to pay back their own political allies, behavior that the Founding Fathers rightly called
corruption and for which they rebelled against Britain.
Look, for example, at the shameless bribes used to get wavering Democratic senators to vote for the healthcare bill. These bribes were so outrageous—even by Washington standards—they each earned a nickname:
• The Louisiana Purchase—Senator Landrieu was promised an additional $300 million in Medicaid funding for Louisiana.
• The Cornhusker Kickback—Perhaps inspired by his Louisiana colleague, Senator Ben Nelson secured exemptions for Nebraska’s Medicaid payments worth around $100 million. Along with Michigan senator Carl Levin, he also got a carve-out from the insurance fees for his state’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield programs. Moreover, insurance fees for Medigap policies sold by Mutual of Omaha and other Nebraska companies were reduced. As California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger put it, “[Nelson] got the corn, we got the husk.”
• The U-Con—Senator Chris Dodd was promised $100 million for a medical center in Connecticut.
• Gator Aid—Senator Bill Nelson inserted a grandfather clause that would protect Florida’s Medicare Advantage program, a $2.5-3 billion buyoff.
• Handout Montana—Senator Max Baucus obtained Medicare coverage for any mineworkers in Libby, Montana, who were exposed to asbestos.
Additionally, Democratic senators from Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Hawaii secured bonuses in the Medicare payments for hospitals in their states worth more than $2 billion.
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