07/18/09
by John Eberhard
As a student of politics, I have observed how over the last century, the liberal, or as Mark Levin calls him, the “statist,” has gradually shifted over to a solid Marxist philosophy, and has been very successful in shifting American government over to a socialist system.
To be sure, it has taken longer than in Europe, but we have shifted over to many socialist systems and are doing so at a much faster pace now than at any time since the New Deal.
I recently realized some things about the liberal/statist, and how he has been so successful, and what conservatives can and should do to fight this socialist advance. Here is what the liberal/statist has done successfully:
- He has wrapped himself in the mantle of positive change, reform, rights and freedom. Indeed, the roots of the words “liberal” and “progressive” mean “freedom” and “progress.” Thus the liberal is seen as the advancer of positive change and reform even when this is not the case. He has also adopted the role or position of the one who fights for the rights of others, even when this is often not the case.
- The liberal/statist has benefited from a tacit agreement or understanding amongst government officials from both parties that once a new program or bureau or division or department is created, you can’t dismantle it or take it away. So he has been able to very gradually legislate and institute socialist policies, programs, bureaus or departments, and in many to most cases, no one has ever considered trying to dismantle or take these things away.
Think about this for a minute. Obama/Reid/Pelosi are currently trying to pass a cap and trade system. They intend to pass national health care. Now if the best case scenario were to happen and a conservative President and Republican majorities in Congress were to be achieved in 2012, would those politicians have the guts to simply dismantle everything that Obama/Reid/Pelosi have done? If not, why not?
Consider this: One of the proudest moments of the 1990s politically for conservatives was the passage of welfare reform. Well Obama/Reid/Pelosi just nuked welfare reform as part of the gargantuan 2009 stimulus bill. You probably didn’t even hear about it because they cleverly hid it in the middle of a thousand page bill that no one read, and the bill itself was so controversial that everyone’s attention was on the stimulus and no one even heard about the fact that they threw in the repealing of welfare reform.
- The liberal/statist benefits from extreme liberal media bias. If you don’t believe this I recommend you read my multiple articles about this on CommonsenseGovernment.com, some of which have been published across the Internet, and books such as “Bias” by Bernard Goldberg, “Journalistic Fraud, How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted” by Bob Kohn, “Slander” by Ann Coulter, “Off With Their Heads” by Dick Morris, “The New Thought Police” by Tammy Bruce.
Liberal media bias is what handed the 2008 election to Barack Obama. Now they are rooting for him, supporting his policies and covering up his mistakes with an enthusiasm I have not seen for any President in my lifetime.
Liberal media bias is part of what makes the liberal/statist/socialist agenda march forward, and what makes conservatives fear to tear down any part of the socialist machine. Because if they were to try, the liberal media would tear them to shreds.
- The liberal/statist has also benefited from the almost universal liberal bent of college professors and Hollywood. So on the one hand we have colleges which have been turned into little more than socialist indoctrination centers, and on the other we have Hollywood turning out TV shows and movies that play loose with the facts and routinely make heroes out of liberals, and portray conservatives in the worst possible light, when they bother to portray them at all.
- The liberal/statist does not give a flying hoot what conservatives or Republicans want, or even what the American public wants, and pursues his agenda with a one-mindedness and complete ignoring of and invalidation of what the other side wants.
OK, so now we have a statement of the problem as I see it. At least in part because of the above, the liberal/statist/socialist in America has been marching toward Marxist utopia for 80-90 years. And dragging us along with him, kicking and screaming.
The conservative response to much of this socialist advance has been simply to try to slow the progression. It has rarely been to formulate any new ideas ourselves and rarely to dismantle pieces of the socialist utopia. Not that I am trashing conservatives here, because I think the deck has been stacked against us.
After reading Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny,” I realized that the major point of departure from the Constitution of the United States began with the New Deal. That is when the Federal government took on far more power than it should have been allowed to do according to the Constitution. So tearing out nearly everything that the liberal/statists have done since the New Deal is what we have to.
So here’s what I think conservatives need to do:
- We need to find a way to wrap ourselves in the mantle of positive change. Liberalism/socialism has been the norm now for so long that to go away from it IS change, much more so than just implementing more of it like Obama/Reid/Pelosi are doing.
- We need to adopt the attitude that we can and should change and dismantle anything that liberals/statists have done. The country does not belong to them. It is our country too.
- We have to find a way to eliminate the extreme liberal bias that exists in the mainstream news media. I agree that the liberal media are destroying themselves, because readers and viewers are departing in droves, newspapers are going out of business and so on. And they no longer enjoy a complete monopoly over the news media because of talk radio and conservative books and the Internet. We saw that with Dan Rather and the Bush/National Guard story. But this disintegration of the liberal mainstream news media is not happening fast enough and liberals still enjoy a distinct advantage here. We have to find a better or faster or more proactive way to counter this.
- Similarly we have to find a way to counter liberal college indoctrination centers and the “Left Coast” of Hollywood. David Horowitz is doing great work urging states to pass college student bills of rights which include not being required to think a certain way to pass courses and so on. I’m not sure what to do with Hollywood. We did have a conservative movie last year, with “An American Carol” a spoof on Michael Moore, but the movie wasn’t that good, and it was only one. We need to do better.
- We have to fight on with our conservative agenda, and – this is very important – we need to not giving a flying hoot what liberals or the liberal media think or say. They will fight us and we need not get their agreement, and we should not care whether they agree or not.
But, and this is important too, we need to make our case better to the American public. George W. Bush did an atrocious job of this, and did not respond to the constant carping and criticism and attacks from the Democratic leadership and the liberal media during his Presidency. The result was that his reputation at long last was completely destroyed.
My readers might be surprised to know that I didn’t like everything that Bush did, particularly the senior drug program and attempts to pass illegal immigrant amnesty. I did like many of the things he did and I supported the war in Iraq and the war on terror. But his biggest failing by far was failing to answer the constant attacks. After 8 years, enough people started assuming they were true, and the result was loss of the White House and control of Congress for Republicans.
It is also important to remember that liberals are not the majority in America and have never been the majority. Different polls over time put liberals at anywhere from 20% to 25%, and conservatives at anywhere from 35% to 40%, with the remainder being “moderates,” meaning people who really don’t understand the difference between liberals and conservatives.
The snarling and carping of the Democratic leadership, the liberal biased echo chamber known as the mainstream news media, and the lap dogs of academia and Hollywood make it appear that liberals are in the majority. They are not. Conservatives are. But we need to speak to the American people and articulately express and promote conservative ideas.
It’s not hopeless for conservatives. Some say that adversity strengthens one. We should take advantage of this time in the wilderness to strengthen our resolve, better formulate our arguments, and select leaders who will really follow a conservative agenda.