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.
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