Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit

By Michael Snyder | June 21, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

When most people think of “Big Brother”, they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies.  Yes, they are definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations.  In fact, there are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for profit to anyone willing to pay the price.  It is called “data mining”, and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything that you do.  Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but data mining goes far beyond that.  When you use a customer rewards card at the supermarket, the data miners know about it.  When you pay for a purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about it.  Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to someone.  Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations is notified.  Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than ever before.  But that also means that our personal information is no longer “private”, and this trend is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

Rep. Allen West: ‘Family Values, Not Government’ Needed for Economic Stability in Black Community

By Amanda Swysgood | June 20, 2012 | CNS News

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a former Army Lt. Col. (AP photo)

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a freshman conservative congressman and former Army officer, said that the “breakdown of the Black family” is one of the most important causes of the economic disparity facing the black community.

“We are here today to talk about economic freedom, as opposed to economic dependency,” West said at a Capitol Hill forum Monday addressing “Economic Empowerment in the Black Community.”

“‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ in the black community are at 28 percent; that leads to a failure in education and that leads to a failure in urban statistics and revitalization,” West said.

A panelist at the forum, West said Black unemployment remains at almost 14 percent — almost double the rate for whites.

“This is a trend that has continued for the past 50 years, during both strong and weak economies,” he said.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Liberal Super Nova

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 11, 2012 | PJ Media

Two parties, left and right, are central to good consensual government — one the perennial check on the other, both within the general boundaries of constitutional free-market capitalism.

Yet the hard-Left takeover of the Democratic Party has meant that there is no longer a credible balance in our system, as almost all the tenets of contemporary left-wing ideology are blowing up, imploding super nova style — unsustainable ideas that are contrary to human nature and demand coercion for their implementation, given that they are increasingly anti-democratic and have to be implemented from high by an elite technocracy whether in Brussels, Sacramento, or Washington.

Far too much is always seen as not enough: Greeks are angry that there was too much “austerity” and not enough of the old borrow and spend; Obama is blamed for only borrowing $5 trillion for too “little” stimulus; Democrats threaten to withhold from the community-organizer Obama because he was not hard enough on “fat cats” and the capitalist state; in California, a 10.3% income tax is too low, not too high. When the remedy is seen worse than the disease, then the patient is indeed terminal.

Let me do a brief survey of the fissuring liberal world in which we live:

Obama’s Sinister “Religion”—Racist Marxism Under a Faux Biblical Veneer

By Kelly OConnell | June 10, 2012 | Canada Free Press

As we ready ourselves for the inevitable onslaught against Romney’s religion, we need to educate ourselves on Obama’s own beliefs, which are the most unusual of any candidate. Even taking Barack at his word, that he is a “Christian”, his beliefs are highly atypical of biblical Christianity. Barack, as an acolyte of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s ideology, is really a follower of James Cone’s own racist and Marxist Black Liberation Theology. This is the subject of today’s essay.

I. Jeremiah Wright’s Church & Rev James Cone’s “Christianity”

Barack Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago Trinity United church for more than two decades. Given the length of time, we must assume that Barack shared the core beliefs of that congregation. But what were Wright’s core beliefs? These are just a subset of Reverend James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology. This connection is explained by Charles C. Johnson of the American Spectator:

Black-On-White Link In Minneapolis Violence

By Colin Flaherty | June 6, 2012 | WND

‘Let’s stop being so P.C.’ about 20-on-1 attacks

Minneapolis police want you to know race has nothing to do with an epidemic of violent crime in their downtown.

Same for crime reporter Matt McKinney: The recent increase in what he calls “flash mob” violence and mayhem is “random” and “no other real pattern emerges” and the “motivation for the attack remains unclear.”

But more and more people in Minneapolis are connecting the violence with groups of blacks marauding through the downtown; beating, hurting, destroying and stealing. Sometimes right in front of police.

The Democrat Crime Family War

By Rush Limbaugh | June 6, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We got Bill Clinton going rogue again, even bigger and even better. And the “criminal enterprise” known as the Democrat Party… Well, “criminal enterprise,” in quotes. Think of it as a mob family. Think of the Democrat Party as a mob family with the head honcho in Chicago.

Dennis Prager: Americanism is the Best Hope

By Dave Gordon | June 3, 2012 | Breitbart News

Dennis Prager is a popular and respected conservative radio talk show host, broadcasting since 1982 and nationally syndicated since 1999.

In his fifth book, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (Broadside Books) Prager maintains that the world must decide between American values and two oppositional alternatives: Islamism and European-style democratic socialism.

The reasons for America’s greatness lie in what he calls the American Trinity, imprinted on US coins: E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, and Liberty.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: The Academic Mob Rules

By Naomi Schaefer Riley | May 8, 2012 | Wall Street Journal

Instead of encouraging wide discussion, the Chronicle of Higher Education fires a blogger.

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,'” in which the reporter described how “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The “5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates” described in the piece’s sidebar “are rewriting the history of race.” While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap,” at worst.

House Dems Receive Training on Portraying Conservatives as Racist

By William Bigelow | May 13, 2012 | Breitbart

Maya Wiley is the founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion. (photo via website)

In the latest transparent attempt by the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to make the 2012 election a referendum on supposed racism and not Obama’s dismal performance, House Democrats received training this week on how to portray neutral free-market rhetoric as racially charged.

Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion, whose statements were distributed at a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, cynically called conservative messages “racially coded … right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process” for over 25 years.

Wiley was invited to the caucus by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif  to run the Democrats “through their strategy and how they message and talk about stuff” pertaining to race and fiscal policy.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Report: House Dems trained on how to use race against the GOP (theblaze.com)
• Federal Elected Democrats had training on how TO make Race an Issue this Election. They are to “Call negative comments as ‘Racist'” (sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com)
• House Democrats trained on how to play the race card (twitchy.com)
• Key Soros Ally Provides Race-Rhetoric Training Session for House Democrats (spectator.org)
• It’s All Racism , All The Time (youviewedblog.wordpress.com)
• Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism – 2010 (biggovernment.com)
• Allen West and His Critics (spectator.org)

How to Think About the Foundations of American Conservatism

By James Ceaser, Ph.D. | December 10, 2008 | Heritage Foundation

Contemporary American conservatism, which is notorious for its internal factionalism, is held together by a self-evident truth: conservatives’ shared antipathy to modern liberalism. Their main objections are well-known.

Almost to a man or woman, conservatives oppose using government authority to enforce a vision of greater equality labeled by its supporters, with great seduction, as “social justice.” Nearly as many conser­vatives object to the use of government authority–or, alternatively, to the denial of government authority where it is natural, legal, and appropriate–to pro­mote a worldview of individualism, expressivism, and secularism. Finally, most conservatives want nothing to do with an airy internationalism, frequently suspi­cious of the American nation, that has shown itself so inconstant in its support for the instruments of secu­rity that are necessary in the modern world.

No shame attaches, or should, to relying in politics on the adhesive property that comes from the senti­ment of common dislike. That sentiment is the heart that beats within the breast of the conservative move­ment, supplying much of its unity. This heart sustains four heads, known generally as religious conserva­tives, economic or libertarian-minded conservatives, natural-rights or neoconservatives, and traditionalists or paleoconservatives.

The four heads comprise a coalition of the willing that came together during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The remarkable diversity of this coalition has been both a source of strength and a source of weak­ness for the conservative movement. Each part came into existence at a different time and under differ­ent circumstances, and each has been guided by a different principle by which it measures what is good or right.

• For religious conservatives, that principle is biblical faith.
• For libertarians, it is the idea of “spontaneous order,” the postulate that a tendency is opera­tive in human affairs for things to work out for themselves, provided no artificial effort is made to impose an overall order.
• For neoconservatives, it is a version of “natural right,” meaning a standard of good in political affairs that is discoverable by human reason.
• Finally, for traditionalists, it is “History” or “Culture,” meaning the heritage that has come down to us and that is our own.

There are refinements and subdivisions that could be added to this schema, but it represents, I think, a fairly standard approach to discussing the different intellectual currents inside the conserva­tive coalition. Recently, however, a number of com­mentators have fallen into the practice–I use this expression advisedly–of replacing this four-part schema by a two-part division based on a distinc­tion between the concepts of “Culture” and “Creed.” The new system of categorization derives from a book published last year by Samuel Hun­tington, entitled Who Are We? in which the author offers these concepts as the two basic modes in any society for establishing national identity.[1] The cate­gories are meant to refer to the whole nation, but conservatives have applied them to discussions of their own movement.

My argument in this essay will be that introduc­ing this new categorization schema represents a huge error, especially as a way of discussing conser­vatism. The Culture-Creed distinction does not sim­plify; it distorts. Built into its categories are premises that attempt by fiat to order and arrange the different parts of the conservative coalition. Not only is this arrangement “partisan,” in the sense of favoring the Cultural category, but it also attempts, with no basis either in principle or in fact, to place faith inside of Culture, thereby suggesting a natural grouping of traditionalists and religious conservatives in opposi­tion to natural-rights or neoconservatives. Whether this attempt was undertaken consciously or not is of little matter; what counts are its effects, and these could have serious and negative implications for the conservative movement.

The Concepts of Culture and Creed

Let me now take a step back and describe the concepts of Culture and Creed. Huntington initial­ly provides a social science definition of Culture that is so broad as to be meaningless. Culture con­sists of “a people’s language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral patterns that reflect these subjective elements.”

Huntington is less interested, however, in social science than in recovering a basis today for patrio­tism and for securing unity in America. It is our Culture that concerns him. He labels that culture “Anglo-Protestantism,” which refers to everything that Huntington elects to emphasize among the first New England settlers. His selection boils down to four main elements: our language (English); our religion (dissenting Protestantism); our basic polit­ical beliefs (a commitment to liberty, individualism, and self-government); and our race (white).

Since Huntington wants Culture to work as a source or standard of identity, and identity in a pos­itive sense, he allows it to evolve in order to per­form its function. In its evolved form, the Culture to which we should look refers–still–to the English language and to the same commitment to liberty and self-government; the notion of religion is broadened slightly from dissenting Protestantism to Christianity insofar as it has been Protestantized. Race as a criterion of distinction drops out.

As for Creed, Huntington initially defines it in a social science fashion as the taking of bearings from theoretical claims that are offered in principle as universal or applicable to all. Examples of Creed that he identifies are communism and classical lib­eralism. The use of these broad-based theoretical concepts is what Huntington means by Creedalism as distinguished from Culturalism. As he says at one point:

People are not likely to find in political principles [i.e., a Creed] the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact, but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful community.

Once again, however, Huntington’s interest in Who Are We? is more in our own Creed than in Creeds in general. Our Creed consists of an idea of nature, specifically of natural rights, as articulated in documents like the Declaration of Independence.

How does the binary distinction between Cul­ture and Creed replace and subsume the four-part division of conservatism? The implication is the following. The category of Culture consists of tra­ditionalists and religious conservatives–the first for the obvious reason of their emphasis on our his­tory and culture and the second because Hunting­ton identifies dissenting Protestantism as first or original. The category of Creed consists of natural-rights or neoconservatives and libertarians–the former because they regularly reference natural rights and the Declaration of Independence and the latter because they think in terms of general princi­ples of economic reasoning.

An example will help to illustrate how this bina­ry mapping of conservatism has entered into con­temporary discussion. Lawrence Auster, an outspoken conservative, publishes an instructive blog entitled “View from the Right.” Never one to mince words, he begins a spirited entry of October 25, 2005, with an attack on President George W. Bush (one of his frequent targets) in an article iron­ically entitled “Under Bush and the American Creed, America Continues Its Bold Progress”:

At President Bush’s annual Ramadan dinner at the White House this week–did you know the President has an annual Ramadan dinner?–he announced for the first time in our nation’s history we have added a Koran to the White House Library. Yippee.[2]

Arguing that this recognition serves unwisely to legitimize Islam in America, Auster finds further evidence of this same error in a passage from a speech given the previous week by Senator John McCain at the Al Smith Dinner:

We have a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin, but our shared faith is the belief in liberty, and we believe this will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.[3]

In Auster’s view, the McCain-Bush position rep­resents the perfect expression of creedal thinking:

According to McCain, the meaning of America is that we have no common culture and no coherent set of traditions but give equal freedom to all cultures, traditions and religions. Such a cultureless society is stronger and more enduring than any other.[4]

Auster may have taken some liberties with the strict claims of Bush and McCain, but his general point could not be more clear: The end result of the Creed is at best indifference, at worst hostility, to Culture.

The Problem with the Culture-Creed distinction

This application of the Culture-Creed distinc­tion to the conservative movement contains two assumptions. The first is that Creedalists are not true conservatives, but conservatives on their way to becoming liberals, if they are not there already. The other is that religious conservatives–meaning those concerned with biblical faith–fall inside the category of Culturalists. Here would seem to be the main gambit involved in this analysis: to define those of faith as closer to cultural traditionalists than to proponents of natural rights.

In light of this questionable mapping of the con­servative movement, it is fair to ask whether Creed and Culture make up helpful categories that assist in understanding reality, or whether they force the analyst to describe reality in a way that satisfies these categories.

Thomas Hobbes, that puckish British philoso­pher, has a chapter in Leviathan in which he reminds us that abstract categories are human con­structions, born either of men’s efforts to compre­hend the world or of the aim of some to dictate how others will think. The result very often is that these terms are imprecise, conflating different things under the same label and producing ever-growing confusions. Hobbes was a very timid man, and as is not infrequent with personalities of this kind, he was also a bit of a sadist. The trait served him well in describing how an individual, when employing a poorly circumscribed category, will soon find him­self “entangled in words as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles, the more belimed.”

Have we become “belimed” by adopting the Cul­ture-Creed distinction?

I bear some slight personal responsibility for popularizing this distinction. Last year I wrote a review essay on Huntington’s Who Are We? for The Weekly Standard.[5] In contrast to the avalanche of reviews from the Left attacking the book, mine was in many ways very appreciative. I followed the Golden Rule of discussing the work of a major thinker, which is to treat it initially on its own terms. Hence my lengthy discussion of the Cul­ture-Creed distinction, on which I offered two observations.

First, I pointed out that more than 20 years ago, Huntington wrote a previous book on America–a fact he all but hides in this one–in which he invoked the Culture-Creed dyad.[6] In both books he argues that forging our national identity requires relying on both Culture and Creed. But whereas in the earlier book he contends that America should emphasize the Creed, in the current one he argues that it should identify more with the Culture.

Second, I asked what reason could account for so fundamental a change. A higher ordering idea of some kind, contained either within one of the two principles or coming from a new one, ought to have been supplied to account for how to regulate the appropriate mix of Culture and Creed. I offered a couple of speculative comments of my own on this issue and suggested that it would be a nice question for others to consider.

In the past year, this theme has been taken up by two well-known political scientists. In a recent issue of The Claremont Review of Books, the editor, Charles Kesler, has a fine essay on Huntington’s work. He begins with some cogent criticisms of how Huntington allows the concept of Creed to slide from its specific and original American mean­ing (a support of natural rights) to its more general social scientific meaning (any kind of broad type of theoretical reasoning). The result is a category that encompasses everything offered in the name of rational principles, from the position of limited government and individualism of the Founders to the Big Government position of the Progressives.

Following this clarification of the concept of Creed, Kesler goes on to argue that we need both concepts, but that the standard of regulation must stem from the Creed (properly understood). He concludes his essay:

The American creed is the keystone of American national identity; but it requires a culture to sustain it. The republican task is to recognize the creed’s primacy, the culture’s indispensability and the challenge which political wisdom alone can answer, to shape a people that can live up to its principles.[7]

Another very perceptive article appeared this fall in Society, written by Peter Skerry. Skerry takes Huntington to task for much of his treatment of the status of the Hispanic community in America and for his analysis of the process of immigrant integra­tion into an American identity. On the major theo­retical distinction of Culture and Creed, however, Skerry embraces Huntington’s analysis and shares his Cultural emphasis. America needs both Creed and Culture, but the senior partner today is–and should be–Culture, which Skerry observes is “at the core of Huntington’s understanding of Ameri­can national identity.”[8]

Both of these essays, each critical in its own way of Huntington’s work, make use of the Culture- Creed distinction. In doing so, they, along now with many other writings, lend credibility to the view that these categories are adequate to define the terrain of this inquiry. It is this position that now needs to be challenged.

Before turning directly to this question, it is worthwhile to observe that for many “Culturalists,” there appears to be as much politics as social sci­ence in the Culture-Creed categorization scheme. No sooner is the distinction introduced than Cul­turalists put it to work to argue for their positions on two major issues of the day.

The first is the previously mentioned matter of immigration policy. Culturalists are deeply con­cerned with the current rate and character of immi­gration. Huntington devotes a large portion of his book to warning of the threat to national unity posed by the influx of Hispanics, largely Mexican. We are in danger of establishing two different cultures in the United States: one English-speaking and Anglo-Protestant, the other Spanish-speaking and, I sup­pose, Latin Catholic. Not only is it said that a Cultur­al approach makes us more aware of this problem, but also Creedalists are charged with being incapa­ble of taking this problem seriously. Their reasoning in universal terms about all human beings makes them “a-Cultural” or anti-Cultural, which for practi­cal purposes means, for immigration politics, multi­cultural. The Culture-Creed distinction is put to use as the proverbial stick with which to beat certain (alleged) foes of immigration restriction.

The other issue on which Culturalists insist today is foreign policy, where many of them are highly critical of the Bush Administration’s position on the war on terrorism. The Administration’s pol­icy in launching the Iraq war and in emphasizing democracy is again said to be a consequence of Creedal thinking, which in its universalistic per­spective leads to a naïve belief, often labeled “Wil­sonianism,” in the possibility of exporting Western democracy to the rest of the world. Creedalism blinds one to the factual primacy of Culture. If the Creedalists who have designed the current foreign policy appreciated the strength and soundness of Culture at home, acknowledging that every other nation or civilization has its Culture just as we have ours, the folly of their grandiose project of nation building would quickly become evident to them.

Culturalists here, incidentally, have their closest allies among those on the Left, including the mul­ticulturalists, who on this issue adopt the Cultural­ist and realist position. Again, the Culture-Creed distinction becomes the weapon of choice in attacking a policy even though a good number of natural-rights conservatives have expressed reser­vations about this policy of their own.

A Better Foundation

Huntington’s inquiry is concerned with cohe­sive­ness and justification–with what enables Americans to be a people, in the sense of possessing unity, and with what makes this people good or worthy in its own eyes. Creed and Culture are said to provide the categories that cover this terrain and allow for intelligent investigation of these ques­tions. But these categories, I have argued, are nei­ther adequate nor exhaustive. Even as defined, they are hugely asymmetrical. Creed refers to a doctrine or set of principles; Culture is presented as a com­pilation of existing sociological facts and realities. But as should be obvious by now, Culture is used to do far more than reference pure facts. It is itself a doctrine that selects facts and bids us to judge the world in a certain way.

It seems to me that a more rewarding approach to the study of unity would begin by separating the study of pure sociological facts–the analysis of what is (or has been) our language, our customs, beliefs, and the like–from all doctrines meant to supply an idea of unity and of right. It would then be possible to examine these doctrines without built-in presup­positions to see how they conceive of cohesiveness and deal with certain sociological facts.

Given my time limits here, I will restrict myself to three major doctrines that were put forth in the early period of our history and that remain impor­tant for contemporary politics and the modern conservative movement: natural rights, traditional­ism, and faith.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• A Positive Vision for American Conservatism (constitutionclub.org)
• Con-fusion (spectator.org)
• The Point of a Republic: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• American social conservatism here to stay (mysanantonio.com)
• Conservatism losing its way, as usual (orthosphere.org)
• From Mitt Romney to Ron Paul: The vast wasteland of American conservatism (thehill.com)
• A hopeful, youthful, idealistic and optimistic conservatism (dailycaller.com)
• Calvin Coolidge: “The Inspiration of the Declaration” (johnmalcolm.me)
• Ron Paul Campaign (which still exists) frustrated by conservatives who fail to recognize Santorum rejects Goldwater (theblaze.com)
• Marco Rubio’s liberal foreign policy (dailycaller.com)

The Empire of Poverty [Video]

By Daniel Greenfield | April 29, 2012 | Sultan Knish

Controlling a large number of people isn’t easy. The United States alone consists of 312 million people spread out across nearly 4 million square miles. Add on nearly 500 million for the population of the European Union and another nearly 4 million square miles of territory. Then pile on Canada with 34 million people and another 4 million square miles, Australia with 22 million and 3 million square miles and a few other stragglers here and there, and the postmodern rulers of the progressive empire have to cope with nearly a billion people spread out across 15 million square miles.

Large territories and large numbers of people are very difficult to govern. Structures tend to break down and people further away from the centers of power don’t listen to the boys at the top. The only way to make a going proposition of it is to consolidate as much power as possible at the center and the very act of centralizing power leads to tyranny.

The most direct chokehold possible is physical. China’s rulers, faced with vast territory and population, turned to the water empire. The modern West is quickly rediscovering a more sophisticated form of hydraulic despotism, cloaked in talk of saving the planet and providing for everyone’s needs.

Western resources are not innately centralized, which makes seizing control of them and routing them through a central point more difficult. This has to be done legislatively and has to be justified by a universal benefit or a crisis. One example of this is FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act which allowed the government to control wheat grown on a farm for private consumption. Another is nationalizing health care by routing the commercial activity of medicine through government organs. Both services and commodities can be controlled in this manner.

But the larger challenge is that the West is rich and a water empire depends on scarcity. Central control is much less potent if there is plenty of the commodity or service available. It’s only when shortages are created in bread or health care that the system really wields power by rationing a scarce commodity or service.

If a resource is scarce, then the water empire has to distribute it efficiently. But if a resource is widely available, then the water empire has to find ways of making it scarce, until the demand vastly outstrips the supply.

The modern water empire is dependent for its power on manufactured shortages. The rise of the progressive state was closely tied to its exploitation of shortages. Its challenge has been to win the race with industrial productivity by manufacturing shortages and destroying wealth faster than it could be created. While the machine of industry created wealth, the machine of government destroyed it. Today the machine of government is very close to winning the race, creating a state of permanent shortages.

Manufactured shortages are the great project of modern governments. This manufacture is done by prohibitively increasing the cost of creating and distributing products and services, by controlling the means of production in the name of wealth redistribution and by prohibiting the production on the grounds that it is immoral or dangerous. Over the 20th century the transition was made from the first to the second and finally to the third.

The third means of manufacturing shortages is the final trump card in the race between human ingenuity and government power. It began with pollution regulation and has reached the stage where all human activity, from a bike ride to the corner to a puff of exhaled air, is a form of pollution. The carbon footprint is to the human being what the Agricultural Adjustment Act was to wheat, a mandate for total central regulation of all human activity.

While the second means of manufacturing shortages only justified redistributing wealth, the third prevents its creation. It is the final lock of the water empire. When it slides into places, shortages become permanent and the Empire of Poverty rules over all.

The Empire of Poverty is the modern incarnation of the water empire, its feigned concern for social equality disguising its hunger for total power. With the third stage, the empire of poverty is mostly putting aside its pretense of controlling production in order to maximize human benefits from the products or services and is shifting over to controlling production in order to deny use of the products and services to those who need them.

Global Warming rhetoric is still couched in the usual social justice rhetoric, aimed at the poorer kleptocracies who are eager to join the line for a handout, but its logic is poverty driven. It is not out to create wealth, but to eliminate it, on the grounds that cheaply available food or electricity is an immoral activity that damages the planet.

Read the full article here.

Adam Taxin interviews Daniel Greenfield for a bit under five minutes about his Sunday, April 29, 2012 column, “The Empire of Poverty.”

Related Articles

• The Great Collapse of the US Empire by Jeff Berwick (postamericana.wordpress.com)
• Abhijit Banerjee: ‘The poor, probably rightly, see that their chances of getting somewhere different are minimal’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Frank Ward on ‘Economics of Agricultural Water Conservation: Empirical Analysis and Policy Implications’ (aquadoc.typepad.com)
• The Violence of Poverty (counterpunch.org)
• The Empire versus Iran and Syria: A New World War for a New World Order? (usapartisan.com)
• Glenn Beck, National Decline And The Story Of The Roman Empire (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• A Rejoinder to “I’m worried” (ritholtz.com)
• Singing for the Empire: Make love, then war (intrepidreport.com)

Andrew Klavan: Why Racism and Conservatism Don’t Mix [Video]

I think we should have a frank conversation about race…  because I always take my moral cues from second rate political hacks.

A week or so ago, National Review severed its connection with self-described “benign racist” writer John Derbyshire over a controversial column he wrote for Taki’s Magazine. Reading the commentary and comments about this event, I began to notice that the word racism is not well understood. Leftists, of course, feel that racism means “any uncomfortable facts spoken by a conservative.” Some conservatives seem to have been bullied into accepting that definition and go about on tiptoe speaking in hushed voices to avoid getting pilloried. Other conservatives, in angry rebellion against the bullying, seem to feel that whatever trash they want to talk about their fellow man is A-OK as long as some set of statistics gives them cover.

Personally, I’m a big fan of dictionaries in these situations since, for words to work properly, they have to have definitions. Thus, at the risk of great personal hernia, I have hoisted down my Webster’s Third New International Unabridged, circa 1976, which I keep around for when I want a definition untainted by political correctness or stupidity. But I repeat myself.

“Racism:  The assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others.”

Thus, as we see, it is not racist in itself to point out, say, that black people commit an inordinate amount of the violent crime in this country. (My terrific City Journal colleague Heather Mac Donald does this regularly and, far from thinking to fire her, her editors value her highly, as do I.) Facts are facts.

What is racist, however, according to Webster, is the belief that high crime rates among blacks — or any other psychocultural outcomes — are somehow biologically determined; that you can tell who will win or lose the game of Life by the color of his skin.

I do not believe you can be a true, thinking, coherent conservative and a philosophical racist at the same time. Here’s why:

Read the full article here.

Sharpton Should Have Been Shunned Long Ago

By Aaron Goldstein |  April 18, 2012 | American Spectator

We’ll know who to thank if Florida explodes.

Imagine a white preacher from the South.

Let us suppose this white, Southern preacher utters words full of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Mormon and homophobic venom.

Let us suppose that the hateful words uttered by this white, Southern preacher incited violence which resulted in the deaths of innocent people.

Let us further suppose that this white, Southern preacher bore false witness and accused a man of raping a girl and that this man successfully sued the white, Southern preacher for slander only to refuse to recompense his victim.

Today, this white preacher from the South would be a despised figure. He would not be welcome in polite society. He would be regarded as a hatemonger with neither credibility nor legitimacy. He would be persona non grata. He would be shunned.

But it is today and Reverend Al Sharpton has uttered words full of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Mormon and homophobic venom. Sharpton’s words have incited violence that resulting in the deaths of innocent people. Sharpton did slander an Assistant District Attorney for committing rape and was successfully sued but got others to pay that debt. And yet if a preacher is black instead of white and is based in Harlem instead of Hattiesburg, that preacher isn’t shunned but rather showered with praise and power. Consider what Jeff Jacoby wrote about Sharpton in the Boston Globe:

If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but the fringe. But far from being spurned, he is shown much deference. Democrats embrace him. Politicians court him. And journalists report on his comings and goings while politely sidestepping his career as a hatemongering racial hustler.

Now consider that Jacoby wrote these words in January 2003.

Nearly a decade later little has changed and in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Sharpton’s power might very arguably be at or near its zenith despite the dubious and incendiary nature of his statements regarding the case.

Here is what Sharpton said during a rally in support of Martin in Sanford, Florida on March 22, 2012:

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• At Sharpton Event, Girls Grill Hip-Hop Radio CEO: You ‘Play Music That Degrades Us,’ Dumbs Us Down, ‘Just To Make Money?’ (johnmalcolm.me)
• Hypocrisy by Sharpton and Wallis (wolfsheep2.wordpress.com)
• Al Sharpton’s Reborn Political Power (theroot.com)
• Sharpton breaks promise to Trayvon supporters (pumabydesign001.com)
• Al Sharpton the Hot Topic When Trayvon Martin’s Mom Appears on Bill O’Reilly (inquisitr.com)
• Sharpton Seeks Holy-race War by Equating Trayvon Case With Jesus’ Crucifixion (wyldgoose.wordpress.com)
• How to encourage racism and hatred for political gain (danmillerinpanama.wordpress.com)
• Bozell Column: MSNBC’s Sharpton Sinkhole (newsbusters.org)
• CNN roundtable: Sharpton ‘covering himself’ in Trayvon Martin news coverage (theblaze.com)
• Sharpton lectures us on civility? (wnd.com)

Felonious Munk Presents: Stop It B! Post Racial Society? [Video]

Related Articles

• Nikki Rich Show Exclusive Interview Felonious_Munk Tuesday 7:45pm Est. blogtalkradio.com/theNikkiRichShow (nikkirichshow.wordpress.com)
• PIX 11 Lets Random Comedian Defend Roland Martin In Absurd On-Air Rant (buzzfeed.com)
• A Harbinger of a Post-Post-Racial Future (happolatismiscellany.wordpress.com)
• As State Senator, Obama Pushed for Racial Data Collection (pjmedia.com)
• Open letter to our Myanmar friends to help stopping racial riots (drkokogyi.wordpress.com)

Journalists’ Panel Discussion Shows Critical Race Theory Mainstream to Left

By Tony Lee | April 12, 2012 | Breitbart

On Monday, the Aspen Institute held a discussion about race and the 2012 elections, and its panel featured a roster of liberals.

Touré, one of the most prominent members of the media who has tried to exploit the Trayvon Martin tragedy to push his political agenda, Carlos Velez-Ibanez, a liberal professor of transborder studies, and José Antonio Vargas, a liberal ex-reporter and illegal immigrant who now is a prominent founder of an organization whose objective is to have a “conversation” about immigration, made up the panel, which FOX News’ Juan Williams, another liberal, moderated.

The panelists, in their comments and biases through which they saw America, revealed the wide reach of the legal discipline known as “Critical Race Theory,” which teaches students to see essentially all institutions in America as being the product of a white power structure that has to be systematically disassembled. Derrick Bell was the godfather of Critical Race Theory and, as Breitbart.com revealed, President Barack Obama was one of his many acolytes.

As the Trayvon Martin case begins to go to trial and the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in immigration and affirmative action cases, the left will continue to use these events to attempt to start national dialogues on race. Of course, such dialogues will have subtle — and not-so-subtle — undertones that paint Republicans as intolerant and bigoted. And this will not be by accident, as the panel revealed, for even if those in the liberal media and intelligentsia did not formally take any classes on “Critical Race Theory,” they have been influenced by its tenets and have internalized them.

Exhibit A: Touré

Touré again tried to exploit the Martin case by saying it is about the “ability for us to exist as one America” because “we are very much two Americas, separate and unequal.”

“It is a scar on the American soul, an extraordinarily important moment in American history, and some people are not even recognizing that,” Touré continued. “We are angry this is happening and this is continuing to happen to our young boys.”

Touré said people ask him, “some black boy got killed in Florida and this is a major moment in American history?”

Touré answered that the Martin case is such a moment because it represents “the continued dehumanization of Trayvon and, by association, all black men.”

Speaking about white privilege, Touré said that he was frustrated with whites on the subject, noting that ones he spoke to kept telling him, “I don’t know what you are talking about — show it to me, or prove it to me.”

Touré, whether he knew it or not, was parroting a “Critical Race Theory” tenet that says an absence of specific examples of racism does nothing to disprove that America is a nation based on a power structure that perpetuates white privilege.

Touré then said other whites he spoke to claimed to have no power or privilege; he mockingly said their mindset was, “clearly it must not exist because I have nothing.”

Touré then noted that whenever blacks received rights in America, those rights were then creatively taken away. In the case of Jim Crow following emancipation, Touré was correct.

But Touré took it two steps further.

He referenced an academic hypothesis that after the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s were passed, America tried to restore Jim Crow through other, more creative means by purposely incarcerating blacks. Touré then said that the rise of Obama will lead to another period where rights will be in danger for minorities.

Touré cited the “rise of voter ID laws” as an example of minority rights being in danger, even though voter ID laws are colorblind. He then said that the recent tragedy in Tulsa, Oklahoma — in which gunmen who individually were prejudiced shot and killed five blacks — was proof of whites being angry at blacks in general.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Critical Race Theory and the Trayvon Martin Case (johnmalcolm.me)
• The Vetting: Bell’s Critical Race Theory Promoted in Public Schools (johnmalcolm.me)
• Critical Race Theory: Of The Racists, By The Racists, And For The Racists (johnmalcolm.me)
• What is Critical Race Theory? (johnmalcolm.me)
• Critical Race Theory Resource Guide (johnmalcolm.me)
• Salon, New York Times credit Breitbart with publicizing Critical Race Theory, but . . . (twitchy.com)
• Dr. Thomas Sowell on Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory, and the Mentors of Barack Obama (prweb.com)
• Obama, Media Exploit Trayvon Martin Shooting To Justify Derrick Bell’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ (5440fight.com)
• Bell, via Kagan, on Critical Race Theory: The Constitution Is the Problem (wdednh.wordpress.com)

Obama’s America: Why Black Grievance Will Never End

By Selwyn Duke | April 11, 2012 | American Thinker

When I was 12 years old, I used to play tennis at a certain public park in the Bronx.  One day it got back to me that a black fellow at the courts, whose name I forget, said, “Selwyn doesn’t like black people.”  This raised my eyebrows.  You see, I had never really thought about the man one way or the other.  And what occupied my mind were forehands, backhands, topspin, and volleys, not race.  So the only thing I could figure was that I was probably in a funk one day and didn’t hear and acknowledge a greeting he might have extended.

Whatever the perceived slight, race was a factor.  After all, imagine the reaction if he had been white.  At worst, he might have thought, “Selwyn is a self-absorbed brat,” which would have been closer to the truth.  Or he might just have concluded that I was having a bad day (I was an aspiring player at the time but, lamentably, had a lot of bad days).  Instead, he saw bad intentions where none existed.

Of course, any time someone noticeably different from us appears to slight us, it’s natural to wonder if it may be because of those differences.  But when you consider what many black Americans believe, it’s clear that something else is afoot.  Just consider, for instance, that when Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright accused white people of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” he was not expressing a new belief in the black community.  After Hurricane Katrina, Louis Farrakhan claimed that the breached levees had been blown up by the government; Spike Lee said that his theory wasn’t “far-fetched”; and even before Looney Louie had weighed in, black residents on the street stated that the flooding was part of a conspiracy to rid New Orleans of black people.  On a more frivolous but equally ridiculous note, I’ve heard black golf fans claim that the late-1990s equipment revolution that enabled players to hit the ball farther, and the subsequent lengthening of golf courses, were engineered for the purposes of undermining Tiger Woods, a black man dominating a white game.  Of course, given what we now know about Woods’ extra-curricular activities, targeting him with HIV might have been easier.

To illustrate the phenomenon causing people to believe such inanity, consider a woman in a bad marriage who hates her husband.  She may see him through colored glasses, and then his trespasses are never innocent mistakes, are they?  Instead, much that he does will displease her — and all of it is part of an effort to upset her.  “Why, that’s just the kind of thing he would do!” thinks she.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  He may be lacking or even a cad, and he may sometimes actually try to get her goat.  But that isn’t the point.  It is, rather, that whatever he is or isn’t, she won’t perceive it clearly through those colored glasses.  Hatred is like darkness: the more there is, the less you can see.

And this is precisely the issue in the black community.  Black minister and head of the Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny Jesse Lee Peterson alluded to this when he said that the goal of racial hustlers such as Jesse Jackson is to keep black people angry so that they won’t be able to think clearly.  Yet this “Jacksonizing” of youth is now endemic in the black community.  Too many black children are weaned on ideas such as “The white man is keeping you down,” “The white man has oppressed you,” and “A black man has no place in America.”  They may hear such sentiments from their parents, from Reverend Wrights in churches, from friends, from music and popular culture — and even in school (read here).  The result is that they view whites through colored glasses, seeing bad intentions and Caucasian conspiracies where none exist.  Hey, that’s just the way white people are.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Open Friday: Do Black People Hate White People or Hate The Institution? (ashy2classy.net)
• Don’t White People Kill Each Other, Too? (theroot.com)
• White Man Murders Three Blacks – MSM Not Afraid To Tackle “Race” Of Shooter (White, By The Way)) (neosecularist.com)
• Breitbart.com Tries to Tie Prof. Derrick Bell to Farrakhan (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Justice for Treyvon!!!! (afrikanking.wordpress.com)
• Noted Race Pimping douche bag Toure: Obama makes white people violent (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• How to Survive the New Black Panther Party’s ‘Day of Action:’ A Guide for Conservatives (gawker.com)
• Time To Take The White Man Down: ie Racism In Play, again (tarpon.wordpress.com)
• Is Obama Making It Worse? (thedailybeast.com)
• SFgate.comLouis Farrakhan speaks at UC Berkeley (sfgate.com)

Law School Humbug

Heather Mac Donald | Autumn 1995 | City Journal

Law schools across the country have taken on a new function: cleansing students’ souls. The taint to be extirpated, of course, is racism and sexism, and in many classes the sometimes dramatic measures needed to root out such blights have driven away the more mundane task of teaching legal analysis. “I was going home crying every day,” says Linda P., a law student at New York University. The source of her unhappiness was her “Race and Legal Scholarship” course. “No matter what I said, the response was: you don’t know because you’re white. Some students wouldn’t speak to me after class. It scared me, because I thought I was this big liberal, and I was treated like the devil.”

Linda’s professor, Paulette Caldwell, practices the hottest form of legal scholarship today: critical race theory. While therapeutic courses such as Caldwell’s remain a small portion of the curriculum at most law schools, the theory behind them has nevertheless shaken up the legal academy. Only ” feminist jurisprudence” rivals critical race theory in influence and sheer sex appeal; both fashions are cut from the same cloth.

The impact of critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence doesn’t stop at the ivy-clad walls of the legal academy. Feminist jurisprudence has revolutionized the law of sex discrimination and rape. Courts across the country, persuaded that legal practice is deeply racist and sexist, are conducting costly studies of their own alleged biases. Both movements are trying to limit First Amendment guarantees in order to protect female and minority sensibilities; their first success, beyond campus speech codes, has been in the workplace. These repercussions are all the more remarkable when you consider that critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence are fundamentally antithetical to the very notion of law.

Back in the law school classroom, Linda P. is not the only student crying these days. Law professors in many schools boast that their courses have reduced students to tears, sent them fleeing to the dean, and created crosscurrents of hostility in the classroom—proof that the professors are ” touching a nerve.” Frances Lee Ashley, a University of Tennessee law professor, faced numerous charges from students that her “Discrimination and the Law” class was simply a forum for white-bashing, that she favored black students, and that the class exacerbated racial tensions. Ashley was unrepentant. “If teachers intend to open this scary space,” she writes in the California Law Review, “they need to be ready to make it reasonably safe and bearable for all members of the enterprise. . . . As a teacher in a predominantly white but desegregating institution . . . you [cannot] consistently do the right thing if by that you mean behavior that allows the average white student to avoid any feeling of being personally accused or defensive when matters of race are discussed.”

Charles Jones, a professor at Rutgers-Newark Law School, asks students in his critical race theory seminar to write an essay about race relations, challenging, among other things, “the assumption that blacks, Jews, and Latinos are allies.” When a black student wrote about her indelible dislike of white people, Jones knew he had struck gold. He asked the student to read her essay aloud in class; an Italian-American woman burst into tears and fled the room. Fortunately, critical race teachers are prepared for such disruptions. “Getting in touch with your feelings is difficult,” explains Jones. “We let [the Italian-American woman] experience out her grief. She sat out a class or two, and when she came back, she wouldn’t talk.” It was a useful lesson, Jones concludes: “She was naive to think there’s not a lot of cross-racial hatred.” (However open-minded critical race teachers may be about “cross-racial hatred,” it is difficult to imagine this story coming out as it did had a white student written of his dislike for blacks.)

The core claim of both critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence is that law is merely a mask for white male power relations. Law, in other words, is indistinguishable from politics; the purported objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning is a sham.

However crude the multicultural trappings of these theories, their fundamental argument has a respectable pedigree. For over a century, American legal scholars have challenged the traditional distinction between legislative and judicial action. According to the traditional view, legislators make the law; judges merely apply it. Judicial decisions, this tradition holds, are determined by preexisting legal rules, not by the judge’s own whims.

The stakes riding on the accuracy of this conception are enormous. For if rules do not in fact determine the outcome of cases, if judges inevitably enjoy such enormous interpretive discretion that they are virtually creating law as they go along, then the legitimacy not just of the judiciary but of governmental power itself is thrown into doubt.

The first American thinker to question the conventional understanding of law was also America’s greatest legal scholar: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose ideas foreshadowed virtually all of twentieth-century American jurisprudence. Holmes was reacting against the late-nineteenth-century view of law as a fixed system of unchanging, quasi-Platonic principles.

Bunk! replied Holmes; “law is no brooding omnipresence in the sky.” To equate it with a set of timeless legal principles ignores the fact that judges have always transformed the law in accord with changing opinions and social conditions. In fact, argued Holmes, there are no legal principles in any meaningful sense. Law is simply a prediction of “where the axe of the state will fall.”

By the twenties and thirties, Holmes’s skepticism about legal rules had expanded into one of the most powerful movements in American legal scholarship. The “Legal Realists” developed detailed exposés of the malleability of legal reasoning in every kind of judicial decision making. Since precedent can always be found on either side of a case, they claimed, judicial decision making and even fact-finding are often determined by unconscious, irrational factors or by the judge’s political and economic beliefs. Legal rules, in other words, don’t determine outcomes; judges do.

Men of letters as well as the law, the Legal Realists produced a witty and urbane corpus of work—unlike that of the current crop of legal critics. The Realists argued that law should rest on a rational basis, such as the emerging discipline of social science, not on abstractions. Accordingly, they urged judges to sweep away archaic common-law rules that no longer made sense.  Their criticisms were unimpeachable—many of the traditional distinctions determining when someone was liable for an injury, for example, were wholly artificial. But the skeptical judicial housecleaner often turns into the sorcerer’s apprentice. “Gradually, every limitation [on legal liability] begins to seem arbitrary,” warns Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Once a precedent has been established for ignoring existing case law, decisions that follow the law require justification just as much as decisions that depart from it, says Johnson.

Legal Realism lost much of its glamour after World War II. But in the 1970s, leftist law professors dusted off the Realists’ critique and dressed it up in German and French literary and critical theories. Their favorite phrase to describe their work—”trashing”—reflects their nostalgia for the anti- establishment 1960s. The result of their efforts was Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a diverse, sometimes impenetrable mix of Marxist analysis, postmodern literary criticism, and American legal skepticism. CLS dominated the academic left for well over a decade, gaining widespread media attention in the 1980s for tearing up Harvard Law School. (Concurrently, “Law and Economics”—equally iconoclastic—moved in from the right, creating, together with CLS, a pincer offensive on traditional jurisprudence.)

Like many of the Realists, the Crits (as CLS practitioners called themselves) argued that law is just politics wearing robes. But the Crits’ real gripe was not with law but with liberal society. They berated liberalism’s emphasis on individual freedom and limited state power. Many called for a world without distinct public and private spheres, in which the individual would not be “alienated” from the collectivity. The Crits were particularly scornful of “illegitimate hierarchies,” a phrase that included every possible type of ranking or distinction among individuals. Harvard’s Duncan Kennedy, the original bad boy of CLS, infamously called for breaking down law school hierarchies by rotating all law school jobs from dean to janitor on a regular basis and paying all employees the same salary.

According to the Crits, the real purpose of law is to make an oppressive capitalist system appear inevitable. Law does this by duping people into believing that the rules that govern the distribution of property, the performance of obligations, and the relation between the state and civil society are “natural” and necessary. We forget, say the Crits, that law is man-made and could as easily be constructed quite differently—property need not be private, for example; or an employer could have no right to control his employees’ behavior; or responsibility for deviant behavior could be assigned not to the individual but to social forces.

Unlike the Realists, the Crits seldom ventured into the practical world of law reform, preferring instead to generate anti-bourgeois theory in academic comfort. To the extent they did make practical proposals, these consisted of familiar Old Left prescriptions: public ownership of banks and insurance companies, rent control, union control of business, and vigorous housing-code enforcement.

Read the full article here.

Related Articles

• What is Critical Race Theory? (johnmalcolm.me)
• Barack Obama At Harvard Law School And Derrick Bell–Videos (raymondpronk.wordpress.com)
• Critical Race Theory: Of The Racists, By The Racists, And For The Racists (johnmalcolm.me)
• Critical Race Theory and the Trayvon Martin Case (johnmalcolm.me)
• The Vetting: Bell’s Critical Race Theory Promoted in Public Schools (johnmalcolm.me)
• What Left-Wing Law Professors Really Think About You, and the Role of Lawyers (openmarket.org)
• Critical Race Theory Explained (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Soledad O’Brien And Breitbart’s Joel Pollak Clash Over Critical Race Theory (mediaite.com)
• Should Law School Come With a Warning Label? (taxprof.typepad.com)

Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

By John Fonte | December 1, 2000 | Orthodoxy Today

John Fonte examines the philosophical antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile.

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just “in the air.” Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.

And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained “in the air,” but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.

Refining class warfare

We’ll begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville.

Gramsci’s main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the “oppressed” into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks, “The marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.'” What Marx and his orthodox followers described as “the people,” Gramsci describes as an “ensemble” of subordinate groups and classes in every society that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized groups — “the people” — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged to the “marginalized,” then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

It is perhaps here that one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that “there have always been exploiters and exploited” — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis, this was because subordinate groups usually lack the “clear theoretical consciousness” necessary to convert the “structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction.” Revolutionary “consciousness” is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess “false consciousness,” that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of the dominant groups, as “legitimate.” But real change, he continued to believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.

Just as Gramsci’s analysis of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination. In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals: “traditional” and “organic.” What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains, are their own “organic intellectuals.” However, the defection of “traditional” intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held, is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have “changed sides” are well positioned within established institutions.

The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as “absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”

Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified as “Hegelian Marxists” — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the “Frankfurt School” (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness. That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups could be achieved.

Read the full article here.

Related articles

• Understanding the Culture War: Gramscians, Tocquevillians and Others (johnmalcolm.me)
• Bill Whittle: Our Progressive Nightmare and the Conservative Solution (Parts 1 & 2) (johnmalcolm.me)
• Gramsci said (kkcygnet.wordpress.com)
• Antonio Gramsci (earthpages.wordpress.com)
• Book of the Day: The role of faith in the creation of a counter-hegemony for the commons (p2pfoundation.net)

Gen44: The Stunning Narcissism of President Obama

Farm Animals

By Tim Nerenz | March 27, 2012 | TimNerenz.com

They treat us like farm animals. We are not unique children of God to them; we are anonymous members of the herds they assign us to – cattle, hogs, sheep, geese, goats, chickens, according to our demographic voting patterns.  We are livestock to be managed, tended, and lorded over; they have chosen themselves to do the lording.

We are supposed to love them because they treat us well, clean our stalls, and keep slop in our trough.  We are not to think for ourselves, fend for ourselves, or do for ourselves.  We are supposed to stay in our pens, do what they say, go where they tell us, pay for their preferences, and be grateful we have them.

They tell us what we can eat, drink, smoke, wear, drive, say, read, listen to, learn, own, earn, sell, carry, shoot, join, worship, buy, insure, and protest.  They decide what work we can do, what it will pay, how we can raise our kids, who we can marry and how to breed, what businesses we can operate, and what our money is worth.

Read the full article here.

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 […]