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Monday, August 6, 2018

Analyzing how liberals see it


Frank Rich penned this in New Yorker.  It is a superb example of how an articulate media guy can go totally wrong with bad assumptions.  And it tells us howeven the smartest libs see America.

                “The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous. In the aftermath of 9/11, the initial shock and horror soon gave way to a semblance of national unity in support of a president whose electoral legitimacy had been bitterly contested only a year earlier. Today’s America is instead marked by fear and despair more akin to what followed the crash of 1929, when unprecedented millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes after the implosion of businesses ranging in scale from big banks to family farms.”  Wow!  Need a beer to cry into?

                “It’s not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier... Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap.” Here we spot a lib speaking.  Somehow Big Government was supposed to stop recession—overspeculation is the real culprit in recessions.  Gubmit controls millions of people making bad decisions with their money? Then comes the litany of racism (always first), health care, education, law enforcement (not what a conservative would list) and taking a swipe at ‘institutionalized’ religion.  Because libs often reject Christianity or any other faith, they rationalize that they merely dislike the institution.  But do they pray or read God’s word? Not on your life.

            “That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. “ Who the dickens is James Truslow Adams you ask? I thought the American Dream was Jefferson, et. al. It was the dream that you could live the life you wanted in this country and own the dream of land, so readily available. It was a bedrock belief intertwined with Liberty.  But of course, the progressives just label it sentimental and all it means to them is to get wealthier.  

                “The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. Millennials, crippled by debt and bereft of Horatio Alger paths out of it, mock the traditional American tenet that each generation will be better off than the one before. At the other end of the actuarial spectrum, boomers have little confidence that they can scrape together the wherewithal needed to negotiate old age. The American workers in the middle have seen their wages remain stagnant as necessities like health care become unaffordable.” Wait.  Obama passed Dodd-Frank which was supposed to not let Wall Street bandits escape punishment.  But then it was just another screw-up which has now been changed.  “actuarial” is poorly used since it refers to insurance risk assessment.  He means “demographic” but the obscure actuarial is designed to “snow job” the reader. Er, wasn’t the Affordable Care Act supposed to make healthcare affordable? Nowhere are prog cures mentioned.  It’s just a bitch narrative.

                “It would be easy to blame the national mood all on Donald J. Trump, but that would be underrating its severity and overrating Trump’s role in creating it (as opposed to exacerbating it). Trump’s genius has been to exploit and weaponize the discontent that has been brewing over decades of globalization and technological upheaval. His diagnosis that the system was “rigged” was not wrong, but his ruse of “fixing” it has been to enrich himself, his family, and his coterie of grifters with the full collaboration of his party’s cynical and avaricious Establishment.” See all the big words? That says, you can’t argue with me.  You’re dumb. And yet, see where Rich’s blind narrative has to take him—that Trump became Prez just to enrich himself. A guy who has $4B has no intent of helping his country get back on  track.

            The article goes on and on and on, eventually describing Obama as heroic in stopping us from worldwide collapse (actually the recession ended in July 2009, just after he took office and before anything was enacted).  And the real reason for “everything turning to crap”?  You.  All you deplorables, you bitter clingers, you smelly Walmart dwellers, were stupid and you bought into capitalism and it only enriched the evil rich.  What is classic about his overview of humanity and politics was that nowhere did he suggest solutions to the original problems he cited.  Racism?  He didn’t suggest intermarriage and adoption and working together in teams.  Those are known solutions.  He didn’t suggest education savings accounts or anything to promote parental choice and teacher freedom to teach.  Nor were increased high-risk pools for healthcare promoted, nor catastrophic-only policies, nor insurance across state lines.  No Nationwide Revival such as the Great Awakening was proposed to solve religious institutions.  Nor were intact families advanced as a way to reduce crime.  What this shows you is that progressive liberalism, democratic socialism just uses problems as an emotional scream with little intent to solve anything—except to restore themselves to power and lord it over us deplorables.