The Big Picture: Our Curiously Failing Civilization

By Jack Curtis | May 7, 2012 | American Thinker

Governments around the world are in various stages of financial failure, all seemingly trying to be Argentina.  Curious, no?  Look at debt and deficits; you see government spending issues; most of the few exceptions have other problems.  Look then at global migration patterns showing people leaving poor places for places going broke, an unhappy trend line.  Look anywhere; we can’t seem to govern ourselves worldwide, while people protesting are multiplying everywhere.

The U.S. and the EU can’t stop borrowing and spending, though no one can expect their stultified economies to bear the debt they’ve run up.  Arab riots and civil wars reflect those countries’ corrupt dictators’ inability to sufficiently subsidize the citizens.  Armed insurrections and massive demonstrations plague Russia, India, China, and Latin America; Africa has more than its share of failed and failing states.  The Global Incident Map shows worldwide terrorism and both underlines instability and helps explain the migrations.  Predictable civil order seems lost.

For “rich” Europe and North America, it’s the famous doom of all democracies: the citizens have learned to vote others’ wealth to themselves via a devil’s compact with demagogues.  Once in place, such deals can’t be controlled (Who’s re-elected for shutting off the goodies?) until they outrun available resources and impoverish the economy.  “Kick the can down the road” (meaning past the next election) is the U.S. mantra for postponing the end-game; in the EU, it’s quasi-austerity.  It’s the same game in both places: Save the Banks.  The people?  Let them eat cake…

For everybody outside the rich world, it’s the same thing at one remove.  That rich world has been such an engine of the world economy that most of the rest are, in varying degrees, dependents.  When the rich customer cuts back, the dependent suffers.  For those living hand-to-mouth in the first place, the suffering is worse; that puts those governments at more immediate risk.  If we really look, much post-WWII stability has been a wire-walking façade.

Civilization: a state of social culture characterized by relative progress in the arts, science, and statecraft.  Start with the Babylonians; the picture is later expanded by the multicultural Romans (equal opportunity conquerors) and expanded again by the widely differing but integrated Europeans, Indians, and Chinese.  Perhaps it’s time we recognized an additional element in the mix that now defines civilization: technology.

Modern transport, communication, and information technology have linked the whole planet into a functional unity irrespective of language, culture, religion, or other differences.  Whether very poor or wealthy, educated or illiterate, nearly everybody on earth is in reach of a network of information and services via a common, worldwide technology.  The only obvious threats to that lie with paranoid governments insistent on controlling it and various Luddites intent on its destruction to preserve interests under threat.

Such miracles, like free lunches, carry costs.  One cost of the world’s economic integration: a cold in the rich world quickly produces sneezes everywhere else, an unsung partner of things like just-in-time inventory control.  Another cost is the greater awareness of events and conditions everywhere.  The whole world knows at once of riots anywhere; if cell phones organize the rioters, the world knows that, too.  And how a local dictator reacts will appear quickly on YouTube, with any blood in full color.  Poorly informed people are becoming much more knowledgeable and sophisticated, seeing how others live, and developing greater expectations that their governments aren’t prepared to accommodate.  As citizens’ expectations rise, governments facing them before a world audience find their control of events affected, more so when such strategic interests as oil are involved.  An event anywhere can light a fire under a planetary pot; the technology that spreads civilization also expands risk.

When considering political collapse, we look for the signature social meltdown; a strong civilization may work through bad finances.  Before they’re swept from history’s stage, civilizations rot from inside.  What do we see?

Western civilization was the Judeo-Christian replacement for failed Classical Europe.  Its centrality was the general acceptance of Christian morality, built on widespread religious belief and embedded in governments and law.  In what’s being called a post-Christian era, that’s dissolving; Western citizens are struggling with each other over such basics as human rights, obligations, behavior, and the value of human life.

Read the full article here.

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The Art of Political War for Tea Parties

By David Horowitz | December 1, 2009 | FrontPage Magazine

A specter is haunting America – the specter of a people rising. All across the nation Americans are waking up to the threat of a leftist elite determined to fundamentally change America, push through a socialist agenda, and make every citizen dependent on the state. The Obama machine is spending trillions of tax-payer dollars to finance their takeover of the American workplace and stifle the independence of the American people. But America is resilient nation, built on the principles of private property and individual freedom, and the resistance to their socialist plans has already begun.

In May 2009, just five months into the Obama administration, the people of California launched a tax revolt in the biggest spending state in the nation. So reckless were the leftist Democrats who run California (and have done so for as long as anyone can remember) that its deficit alone was larger than the budgets of most other states in the Union and of many of the nations of the world. Leftwing politicians don’t cut budgets; they propose new taxes. And California’s leftwing legislature did just that. But thanks to a constitutional amendment put in place by the California electorate through the state Initiative process, California legislators can’t raise taxes without a two-thirds referendum of the people. So they were forced to hold a special election in May to appeal to the electorate to pass five new ballot Initiatives to raise taxes.

But when the votes were counted, all five tax-raising Initiatives had been defeated by 60% margins. Even in San Francisco. A sixth Initiative designed by tax opponents to punish legislators who do not balance the budget passed by a more than 70% margin. Even in San Francisco. If one of the most liberal states in the Union is saying no to the soak-the-public philosophy of leftwing legislators, Obama socialism is in big trouble.

The revolt in California quickly spread to the entire nation through the efforts of the Tea Parties movement, the most innovative, exciting and powerful grassroots force in the history of American conservatism. It is vital to the health of this country that the Tea Parties movement grow. More to the point: it is essential to American survival that the Tea Parties movement succeed. On the eve of the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama said “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” The Tea Parties movement is the American people saying no to Obama’s plans for revolution.

A movement without an effective strategy for defeating its opponents cannot succeed. Therefore it is important to reacquaint ourselves with the art of political war.

Read the full article here.

The Coming Clash of Worldviews

By John McLaughlin | March 23, 2012 | American Thinker

Current conventional wisdom about the November elections says the biggest issue will be “jobs” and who can best revive the economy.  However, emerging out of the rhetorical fog is the shape of something far more fundamental: a stark oncoming clash of worldviews demanding resolution.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Barack Obama, unable to run for re-election on a record of positive economic accomplishments during his first term, has decided to reframe the election debate as a final choice between two worldviews.  If he hadn’t done so, the same debate would have been forced upon him by those terrified by what they see ahead.

In his recent State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama sought to define the conflict as being between two irresolvable opposites of his choosing:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.  Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

He goes on to present a false choice between doing nothing and creating an economy in which achievers must be pulled down rather than the poor raised up — all in the interests of “fairness.”  At no point does Obama consider reducing the cost, size, and reach of government.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) makes clear that Obama’s worldview has never had an underlying economic argument.  Instead, in a recent interview published in The Wall Street Journal, Cantor claims that it is “all about social justice.”

The “philosophical starting point” of today’s Democrats, as Mr. Cantor sees it, is that they “believe in a welfare state before they believe in capitalism. They promote economic programs of redistribution to close the gap of the disparity between the classes. That’s what they’re about:  redistributive politics.”

In a speech on the Senate floor last summer, Marco Rubio (R-FL) made clear that the competing worldviews to be settled in the upcoming election will be between those who believe that the government’s job is to “deliver economic justice” and those who believe that the government’s job is to “promote economic opportunity.”

Are these views reconcilable?  Senator Rubio thinks not.

Ultimately, we may find that between these two points there may not be a middle ground, and that, in fact, as a nation and as a people, we must decide what we want the role of government to be in America, moving forward.

Interestingly, the conflict between freedom for individual wealth-creation at all economic levels and government-enforced wealth-redistribution has roiled since the earliest days of our nation’s founding.  As students of world history know, the dominant governing model worldwide for thousands of years involved a strong central authority usually led by a ruling individual, be he king or tribal chief or dictator by some other name.  Not until the 17^th century would groups of individuals escaping the tyranny of Europe’s top-down rule settle on the shores of a new continent to try a different way.

On a ship to the new land, Pilgrims so adverse to the old ruling model voted to adopt a new one — a “Commonwealth” — where each family would provide common goods for the community to be shared equally.  As documented by their first American governor, William Bradford, the Plymouth colony suffered mightily as a result.  Some refused to contribute equally.  Basic human nature kicked in as  top producers refused to assist slackers, and the colony almost perished from disease and hunger.  In desperation, they established a private property model, with individuals free to profit from the results of their efforts.  Prosperity returned within a year.  We now celebrate Thanksgiving as a result.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]